100 Must-Read Life-Changing Books

BLOOMSBURYGOODREADINGGUIDES

100 MUST-READ

LIFE-CHANGINGBOOKS

Nick Rennison

A & C Black • London

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First published 2008A & C Black Publishers Limited38 Soho SquareLondon W1D 3HBwww.acblack.com

© 2008 Nick Rennison

ISBN: 978–0–7136–8872–6

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced in any form or by any means – graphic, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or information storage and retrieval systems – without the written permission of A & C BlackPublishers Limited.

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CONTENTS

ABOUTTHISBOOK iv

INTRODUCTION vi

A–ZLISTOFENTRIESBYAUTHOR x

ATOZOFENTRIES 1

THEMATICENTRIESAltered consciousness 61 • The child is father to the man 94 •

Classics for children (and adults) 9 • Exploration and endurance

121 • Great thinkers, great ideas 39 • In touch with nature 16 •

Inspiring memoirs 65 • It’s all in the psychology 96 • Making

sense of death 113 • Native wisdom 18 • New physics, new

philosophy 14 • Society will never seem the same 45 • Surviving

the Holocaust 141 • Up from slavery 30 • Wisdom from the East

134 • Womanpower 48

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ABOUTTHISBOOK

The individual entries in the guide are arranged A to Z by author. They

describe the chosen books as concisely as possible and say something

briefly about the writer and his or her life. Each entry is followed by a

‘Read on’ list which includes books by the same author, books by

similar authors or books on a theme relevant to the entry. Scattered

throughout the text there are also ‘Read on a theme’ menus which list

between six and a dozen titles united by a common theme.

All the first choice books in this guide have dates attached to them.

In the case of English and American writers, there is one date which

indicates first publication in the UK or the USA. For translated writers,

there are two dates. The first indicates publication in the original

language and the second is the date of the book’s first appearance in

English. For example, Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex is marked

as 1949 (first publication in French) and 1953 (first translation into

English). For some older texts, either there is no commonly accepted

date for publication or the idea of publication, in the modern sense,

was largely meaningless in the social context in which they were

written. In these instances, approximate dates for the writing of the

texts have been given.

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ABOUT THIS BOOK

In choosing the 100 books for this guide, I have followed in the

footsteps of Desert Island Discs. The guests on that long-running radio

programme are always asked about the one book that they would take

with them to the desert island but it is assumed that the Bible and the

Complete Works of Shakespeare are already awaiting them on the

sands beneath the palm trees. In the same way, I have excluded the

Bible, the Koran and other major religious texts as well as Shakespeare

from my list. On the basis that poetry is too large a subject to have what

could be seen as just a token presence in this guide, I have also omitted

volumes of verse. Khalil Gibran’s The Prophet, which some people

would label poetry, I have included because I prefer to categorise it as

lyrical prose.

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INTRODUCTION

What exactly is a ‘life-changing’ book? There is no genre of ‘life-

changing’ literature in the same sense that there are genres of ‘crime

fiction’, ‘romantic fiction’ and ‘science fiction’ yet nearly all enthusiastic

readers would acknowledge that some books they have read have had

a profound impact on them. Books that change lives undoubtedly exist.

This guide is not meant to provide a list of the ‘best’ life-changing books

available. The idea that there can be a definitive list of the books most

likely to change lives, and change them for the better, is a ludicrous

one. Books can change lives but they do so in a wide variety of often

subtle ways. Very different books can, in different ways, be life-changing

and the selection of titles in this book reflects that. 100 Must-Read Life-Changing Books finds space for, amongst others, a children’s novel

about a young girl who discovers a key to a secret garden, a Chinese

text on war from the sixth century BC, a black comedy set in the Second

World War, the autobiography of one of the twentieth century’s most

remarkable statesmen, a handbook on happiness by one of the world’s

great religious leaders and a fable about a pilot who meets a story-

telling child in the Sahara desert. What such widely varying books dohave in common is that they have all changed the lives of readers in the

past and they will continue to do so in the future.

Some books can change people in very specific ways. Those oppressed

by racism can take strength from works like the autobiographies of

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INTRODUCTION

Nelson Mandela and Malcolm X. Women can reassess society and their

own position in it after reading books like The Female Eunuch or TheBeauty Myth. Those who feel themselves alienated from the world can

take heart from reading about the lives of those, like Helen Keller, who

have triumphed over the most extraordinary odds. This guide includes

a significant number of titles which fall into this category.

Other books have a greater life-changing impact when read at one

age than they do when read at another. Some novels read in adoles -

cence (Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye, for example, or Kerouac’s Onthe Road) can fundamentally alter the way in which the reader views

the world. They become so identified with a particular period in the

reader’s life that re-reading them later can be a disconcerting, even

disillusioning, experience. Yet adolescence is not the only age at which

certain books are likely to have their most profound effect. E.M. Forster

once wrote that, ‘the only books that influence us are those for which

we are ready, and which have gone a little farther down our particular

path than we have yet got ourselves’. And, as Doris Lessing says in her

introduction to a 1971 edition of her novel The Golden Notebook (a

book which has its own place in this guide), ‘Remember that the book

which bores you when you are twenty or thirty will open doors for you

when you are forty or fifty — and vice versa.’ Her advice to readers

(‘Don’t read a book out of its right time for you’) remains valid.

Books that make us look at the world anew can be either fiction or non-

fiction. Both have their place in a guide to life-changing literature. Novels

can be much more than just entertainment – engaging narratives with

which to while away some of life’s idler moments. Very often emotional

truths can be better conveyed through stories than they can by any other

means. The stories we have always told ourselves give meaning to our

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100 MUST-READ LIFE-CHANGING BOOKS

lives and help to draw us out of the narrow sphere of self into a more

active engagement with others. It should come as no surprise to learn

that about a third of the titles in 100 Must-Read Life-Changing Bookswill be found on the Fiction shelves in any bookshop or library.

The two-thirds of titles in the guide that are non-fiction can be further

sub-divided into a number of smaller categories. There are memoirs of

remarkable people which can inspire new ways of seeing our own lives.

There are masterpieces of spiritual insight, which can re-adjust one’s

sense of the human and the divine and the relationship between them,

and books by distinguished scientists which explain for non-scientists

the often dizzying ideas about the nature of the universe and about our -

selves which modern physics and biology have revealed. Other entries

in the guide introduce the works of psychologists whose writings re-

interpret human nature, self-help authors who can open up new paths

through life for people in trouble and commentators whose wisdom and

understanding make us look again at the kind of society we have created.

I have tried to make the selection of 100 books in this guide as

interesting and varied as I could. Some were written more than 2,000

years ago, some in the last 20 years. Some present a simple and direct

message to their readers, others a demanding and challenging

intellectual argument. Some are the work of people who are household

names, others by writers who are less well-known than, perhaps, they

should be. There were titles which it was very difficult to ignore. It would

be difficult to argue with the sheer statistics of numbers of copies sold

and claim that books like Paulo Coelho’s The Alchemist and Richard

Bach’s Jonathan Livingston Seagull do not deserve their places in a

guide to life-changing books. There are other titles (Jean Giono’s TheMan Who Planted Trees, for example) which may not have quite the

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INTRODUCTION

fame that others do but which, I would argue, have a message for

readers just as important.

There is sometimes an assumption that, if we want to change our

lives for the better, the books that we read should be relentlessly

upbeat and optimistic. It is an assumption on which many a career in

writing self-help and business books has been built but it is, I think, a

false one. We cannot change ourselves or our lives in any meaningful

way by pretending that the world is other than it is or that terrible things

do not happen in it. A significant number of the books in this guide have

as their subject matter some of the worst events in human history. Yet,

paradoxically, books about the Holocaust (Primo Levi’s If This Is a Manor Elie Wiesel’s Night) or Stalinist terror (Nadezhda Mandelstam’s HopeAgainst Hope) can be the ones which alter readers’ views of life the

most. Perhaps it is only through facing up to the suffering and

wretchedness in the world that people can come to appreciate the best

that it has to offer.

I return to the point I made in the first paragraph of this introduction.

Books that change lives inarguably exist. I believe that every single one

of the 100 titles I have chosen for this guide can be placed in the

category of ‘life-changing’ books. However, the ways in which books

change lives are multifarious and the titles in 100 Must-Read Life-Changing Books have been selected in order to reflect this fact. Any

reading guide which includes books by J.K. Rowling and Germaine

Greer, Richard Dawkins and Mahatma Gandhi, Stephen Hawking and

J.R.R. Tolkien is going to be wide-ranging, whatever else it is. I hope that

it will also prove inspirational enough to send readers off in search of

books that they might not otherwise have read. And – who knows? –

perhaps some of those readers will find their lives changed.

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Isabel Allende 1

Maya Angelou 2

Margaret Atwood 4

Marcus Aurelius 5

Richard Bach 7

Frances Hodgson Burnett 8

Joseph Campbell 10

Albert Camus 11

Fritjof Capra 13

Rachel Carson 15

Carlos Castaneda 16

Jung Chang 18

Paulo Coelho 20

Dalai Lama 75

Charles Darwin 21

Richard Dawkins 22

Simone De Beauvoir 24

Jared Diamond 25

Philip K. Dick 27

Frederick Douglass 28

Sebastian Faulks 30

Anne Frank 32

Victor Frankl 33

Sigmund Freud 34

Jostein Gaarder 37

Mohandas K. Gandhi 39

Kahlil Gibran 41

Jean Giono 42

Malcolm Gladwell 43

Daniel Goleman 45

Germaine Greer 47

G.I. Gurdjieff 49

A–ZLISTOFENTRIESBYAUTHOR

The following is a checklist of authors featured in this book.

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A–Z LIST OF ENTRIES BY AUTHOR

Alex Haley 50

Stephen Hawking 51

Joseph Heller 53

Eugen Herrigel 54

Hermann Hesse 55

S.E. Hinton 57

Douglas Hofstadter 58

Aldous Huxley 59

William James 61

C.G. Jung 63

Helen Keller 64

Jack Kerouac 66

Ken Kesey 67

Martin Luther King 68

Barbara Kingsolver 70

Naomi Kline 71

J. Krishnamurti 72

Milan Kundera 74

Harper Lee 77

Doris Lessing 78

Primo Levi 80

C.S. Lewis 81

James Lovelock 82

Malcolm X 84

Nelson Mandela 86

Nadezhda Mandelstam 87

Gabriel Garcia Marquez 88

Yann Martel 90

Anne Michaels 91

Alice Miller 92

Dan Millman 94

Toni Morrison 96

Friedrich Nietzsche 98

Michael Ondaatje 99

Boris Pasternak 100

M. Scott Peck 102

Steven Pinker 103

Robert M. Pirsig 104

Sylvia Plath 106

Annie Proulx 107

James Redfield 108

Luke Rhinehart 110

Sogyal Rinpoche 111

J.K. Rowling 113

Antoine De Saint Exupéry 115

J.D. Salinger 116

Eric Schlosser 117

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E.F. Schumacher 119

Ernest Shackleton 120

Carol Shields 122

Peter Singer 124

Alexander Solzhenitsyn 125

Art Spiegelman 127

Henry David Thoreau 128

J.R.R. Tolkien 130

Leo Tolstoy 131

Lao Tzu 132

Sun Tzu 134

Kurt Vonnegut 136

Alice Walker 137

Edmund White 138

Elie Wiesel 140

Jeanette Winterson 142

Naomi Wolf 143

Virginia Woolf 144

Paramahansa Yogananda 146

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A–ZOFENTRIES

ISABEL ALLENDE (b. 1942) PERU/CHILE

THE HOUSE OF THE SPIRITS (1982)Isabel Allende was born in Peru, where her father was Chilean

ambassador, and had a peripatetic upbringing around the world as the

family moved from country to country. As a young woman she worked

for a time in Europe but she was living in Chile in 1973 when the coup

which brought to an end the democratic government of her cousin

Salvador Allende put her life in danger and she was forced into exile.

Her first novel for adults, The House of the Spirits, became an inter -

national bestseller and she has since published more than a dozen

further books, both fiction and non-fiction. ‘What I don’t write, I forget,’

Isabel Allende once said, ‘and then it is as if it never happened; by

writing about my life I can live twice.’ Allende has always drawn heavily

on her own life in her writing. Even her fiction, so often hailed as the

embodiment of ‘magic realism’ and so filled with imagination and

invention, often has its roots in the story of her family. In The House ofthe Spirits strange and wonderful things may happen but, at its heart,

it is a family saga of love and life and death. Three generations of

women provide the backbone of the story, from the moment when the

clairvoyant Clara del Valle first sees her future to the terrible events

which circle around her granddaughter Alba.

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The book was only the first of Isabel Allende’s remarkable works of

fiction which have ranged from Of Love and Shadows, a novel in which

the brutal politics of South America and magic realism meet and

mingle, to Zorro, her own very particular take on the legend of the

swashbuckling, masked hero. By living twice in her own writing, Isabel

Allende has provided her readers with some memorable experiences.

�Read onOf Love and Shadows, PaulaGabriel Garcia Marquez, Love in the Time of Cholera; Alice Walker, TheTemple of My Familiar

MAYA ANGELOU (b. 1928) USA

I KNOW WHY THE CAGED BIRD SINGS (1970)As a young woman, Maya Angelou was a singer and actress, touring the

world in Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess and working in New York

nightclubs. In the 1960s she became a civil rights activist and spent five

years in Africa as a journalist and teacher. Today she is one of America’s

most respected poets and writers. Her finest work is the reconstruction

of her own life she has made in several volumes of autobiography. The

first of these is I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings which records the

difficulties of her upbringing in the American Deep South during the

1930s. With her brother, the young Maya is sent to live with her

grandmother who runs a store in a small town in Arkansas. She learns


3

much from her grandmother but she also witnesses the endemic racism

in the town and the casual contempt that the white people have for the

black. Still only eight years old, Maya is then despatched to stay with her

mother in St. Louis where she is raped by her mother’s current

boyfriend. Mute with trauma and distress, the girl withdraws into her

shell and few people other than her brother are able to reach her. In her

adolescence, and now living permanently with her mother in San

Francisco, Maya continues to suffer guilt and misery. She becomes

pregnant while still at high school and the first volume of the

autobiography ends with the birth of her child and her realisation that

new responsibilities demand a new commitment to life. Poignantly

recreating Maya Angelou’s struggle to forge her own identity and to

triumph over the obstacles of being black and poor in a racist society, IKnow Why the Caged Bird Sings repays reading and re-reading. It is a

scathing indictment of injustice yet it also holds out hope that even the

worst of circumstances can be left behind.

�Read onGather Together in My Name; Singin’ and Swingin’ and Gettin’ MerryLike Christmas; The Heart of a Woman; All God’s Children NeedTraveling Shoes (the other volumes of autobiography)

Zora Neale Hurston, Dust Tracks on a Road

MARY ANGELOU


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MARGARET ATWOOD (b. 1939) CANADA

THE HANDMAID’S TALE (1985)Margaret Atwood is one of Canada’s most admired living writers and

her works range from volumes of prize-winning poetry to historical

fiction like Alias Grace, the story of an enigmatic nineteenth century

serving maid who may or may not be a murderess, and novels (TheEdible Woman, for example) which explore questions of gender and

identity. Probably her finest books, however, use motifs and ideas from

science fiction to throw new light on contemporary debates about

feminism and the position of women. Of these books the most

interesting remains The Handmaid’s Tale. The novel is set in the near

future in the Republic of Gilead, where fundamentalist Christianity rules

and the laws are those of Genesis. Women are chattels: they have no

identity, no privacy and no happiness except what men permit them.

Offred, for example, is a Handmaid, and her life is devoted to one duty

only: breeding. In Gilead public prayers and hangings are the norm;

individuality – even looking openly into a man’s face or reading a

woman’s magazine – is punished by mutilation, banishment or death.

Atwood shows Offred’s struggle to keep her sanity and her identity in

such a situation, and her equivocal relationship with the feminist

Underground which may be Gilead’s only hope. Through the dystopian

prism of Gilead, Atwood is able to investigate many of the issues of

gender and sexuality which trouble our own society and to suggest that

forces in contemporary society (religious fundamentalism, anti-

feminism) could only too easily accommodate the worst forms of

totalitarianism. With great imaginative power she takes some of the


5

MARCUS AURELIUS

darker possibilities of sexual politics and draws them out to extreme

but entirely logical conclusions. The Handmaid’s Tale is a memorable

novel which uses a fictional future to ring warning bells for today.

See also: 100 Must-Read Science Fiction Novels

�Read onThe Edible Woman; Oryx and CrakeAngela Carter, The Passion of New Eve; P.D. James, The Children ofMen; Marge Piercy, Woman on the Edge of Time; Joanna Russ, TheFemale Man

MARCUS AURELIUS (121–180 AD) ITALY

MEDITATIONS (c. 170–180)Roman emperors are remembered for many things – military triumphs,

great buildings which bear their names, indulgence in fabulously

decadent pleasures – but not usually for their philosophical insights.

The exception to the rule that emperors were not profound thinkers was

Marcus Aurelius, who ruled the far-flung empire from 161 AD to his death

nearly twenty years later. His thoughts have come down to us in the

shape of the 12 books of his Meditations, originally written in Greek (to

Romans, the language of philosophy) and put together over a ten-year

period whilst he was on military campaigns in Eastern Europe. These

reflect the influence of the ancient philosophical tradition known as


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Stoicism (although Marcus Aurelius never specifically describes himself

as a Stoic) and of the Greek philosopher Epictetus in particular. A Stoic

believed that the wise man was indifferent to the external world. Virtue

rather than health or wealth or power was the great good in life and the

attainment of virtue was a matter of the individual will. A man could be

virtuous when sick, virtuous when poor, virtuous even (like Socrates)

when under threat of death. What he needed to do was to cultivate the

reason, to recognise the inevitable realities of the world and to turn his

back on the destructive power of irrationality and the emotions. In some

ways the philosophy Marcus Aurelius espoused can seem a bleak one,

emphasising the difficulty of life and duty, but it can also be a liberating

one in as much as it champions the mind’s power over external circum -

stance. Through rigorous training the mind can be shaped and the

character changed for the better. ‘Such as are your habitual thoughts,’

the emperor wrote, ‘such also will be the character of your mind; for the

soul is dyed by the thoughts.’

�Read onBoethius, The Consolation of Philosophy; Cicero, On the Good Life;

Epictetus, The Discourses; Seneca, Letters from a Stoic


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RICHARD BACH

RICHARD BACH (b. 1936) USA

JONATHAN LIVINGSTON SEAGULL (1970)Who would have thought that a slim fable in which a seagull discovers

the truths about life and flight would become one of the bestselling

books of the 1970s? Richard Bach had already served as a pilot in the

US Air Force and had written a number of books about flying and

aircraft when he hit the bestselling jackpot with Jonathan LivingstonSeagull. Bach’s brief text, accompanied by Russell Munson’s photo -

graphs of seagulls in flight, caught the public’s imagination and the

book went on to sell millions. It focuses on the experiences of one bird

– the gull of the title – who dreams of flying faster and more freely than

the other birds in the flock. Eventually he succeeds in reaching at least

some of his goals but he is appalled to discover that the other gulls do

not applaud his achievements. Instead he is told that his desire for

faster and better ways of flying is unwelcome and he is banished from

the flock. It is only when he is introduced to an elite band of gulls who,

like him, have broken free of the limits that the ordinary birds have

imposed upon themselves that he can reach his full potential. Heaven

is on the horizon for him. As one of the elite gulls tells him, ‘You will

begin to touch heaven, Jonathan, in the moment that you touch perfect

speed. And that isn’t flying a thousand miles an hour, or a million, or

flying at the speed of light. Because any number is a limit, and

perfection doesn’t have limits. Perfect speed, my son, is being there.’

Richard Bach’s allegorical example of ‘New Age’ spirituality is an easy

read but more profound thoughts about the possible consequences of

casting off tired routines and ways of thinking lurk behind its simplicity.


8


�Read onIllusions; The Bridge Across ForeverPaul Gallico, The Snow Goose; Oriah Mountain Dreamer, The Invitation

FRANCES HODGSON BURNETT (1849–1924)

UK/USA

THE SECRET GARDEN (1909)Born in Manchester, Frances Hodgson moved with her family to

Knoxville, Tennessee when she was in her teens. She married Dr Swan

Burnett and moved with him to Washington DC in 1873. Her stories had

begun to appear in American magazines in the late 1860s and her first

novel, a tale of life in the Lancashire she had left behind, was published

in 1877. During her lifetime, she was most famous for her novel LittleLord Fauntleroy, the sentimental story of a young American boy of

cloying goodness and innocence who is summoned back to his father’s

native land, England, to be trained to take his place among the landed

gentry. Little Lord Fauntleroy, both the book and the character, are a

little too saccharine for today’s tastes but another of Burnett’s novels,

published much later in her life, has deservedly retained its popularity

and its appeal. The Secret Garden has its share of the same sentiment -

ality that sometimes mars Burnett’s other fiction but the story of the

orphan Mary Lennox, whose misery when she is despatched to her

uncle’s gloomy house on the Yorkshire Moors is only relieved by her

discovery of a mysterious walled garden, has a magic all its own. As


9

READ ON A THEME: CLASSICS FOR CHILDREN (AND ADULTS)

Mary tends the garden, she is able to share it with two other children in

the house – Dickon, the green-fingered servant boy who helps her to

bring it to life, and Colin, the sickly cousin who is transformed by his

experiences in it. Few other books written for a younger readership

convey so well both to children and to the adults they become that

private delight that Mary has when ‘she was inside the wonderful

garden, and she could come through the door under the ivy any time,

and she felt she had found a world all her own’. Mary Lennox’s secret

garden is a place that changes those who visit it; the novel to which it

gives a title also changes lives.

�Read onA Little PrincessEdith Nesbit, Five Children and It; Philippa Pearce, Tom’s MidnightGarden

READONATHEME: CLASSICS FOR CHILDREN (AND ADULTS)

L. Frank Baum, The Wonderful Wizard of OzRoald Dahl, Charlie and the Chocolate FactoryKenneth Grahame, The Wind in the WillowsCharles Kingsley, The Water BabiesRudyard Kipling, The Jungle BookC.S. Lewis, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe


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A.A. Milne, Winnie the PoohL.M. Montgomery, Anne of Green GablesEdith Nesbit, The Railway ChildrenAnna Sewell, Black BeautyNoel Streatfeild, Ballet ShoesE.B. White, Charlotte’s Web

JOSEPH CAMPBELL (1904–87) USA

THE HERO WITH A THOUSAND FACES (1949)Joseph Campbell was a graduate student at Columbia University in the

1920s when he realised that many of the themes and motifs of the

Arthurian literature he was studying were similar to those of the North

American Indian folklore he had read and heard about when he was a

child. It was a revelation to him and it was an insight that was to be at

the heart of all his later work. As he wrote in his seminal work of

comparative mythology The Hero with a Thousand Faces, ‘There are of

course differences between the numerous mythologies and religions of

mankind, but this is a book about similarities; and once they are

understood the differences will be found to be much less great than is

popularly (and politically) supposed.’ Central to so many of the world’s

great mythologies, Campbell argues, is the story of the hero and a

journey he makes that transforms him. From his quiet life at home, the


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ALBERT CAMUS

hero is called to action and must set off into the unknown in quest of

his own particular grail. After a series of lesser trials en route to his goal

he must then face a supreme challenge. If he passes this, he is able to

take home the knowledge he has gained in his travels. The impact of

Campbell’s ideas on the arts has been immense. The film-maker George

Lucas famously cited Campbell’s work as an influence but it is not just

Star Wars that owes him a debt. Plenty of other creative individuals –

musicians, poets and visual artists – have found inspiration in his ideas.

And the idea of the hero and his testing odyssey carries echoes of the

journey we all make from birth to death. In Campbell’s eyes, we can all

be the heroes of our own lives if we choose to be.

�Read onMyths to Live By; The Hero’s JourneyBruno Bettelheim, The Uses of Enchantment; Sir James Frazier, TheGolden Bough; Marina Warner, From the Beast to the Blonde

ALBERT CAMUS (1913–60) ALGERIA/FRANCE

THE REBEL (1951/1953)Born in Algeria, Camus became a leading figure in French literary life

during the Second World War with the publication of his novel TheOutsider and his philosophical essay The Myth of Sisyphus. In the

decade after the war he gained an international reputation and he was

awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1957, three years before he was


12


killed in a car crash. Throughout his relatively short life, in newspaper

articles, plays, essays and novels, Camus explored the position of what

he called l’homme révolté, the rebel or misfit who feels out of tune with

the spirit of the times. From Meursault in The Outsider to Dr Rieux in ThePlague, the man who refuses to conform to the standard values of his

society is at the heart of his fiction. In The Rebel, Camus wrote a book-

length essay about l’homme révolté which examines the motives behind

the urge to rebel, the nature of revolution and the mingled dangers and

opportunities it offers. Camus is unequivocal about the importance of

the rebel, the person who stands against ‘the world of master and slave’

and thus proves that ‘there is something more in history than the

relation between mastery and servitude’ and that ‘unlimited power is not

the only law’. However, he is also clear-sighted enough to realise that

successful rebels or revolutionaries can be corrupted by the power that

they seize through their rebellion and that, as history shows only too

often, a revolutionary government can easily become more despotic

than the regime it replaced. Drawing on a wide range of writers and

thinkers, from the Marquis de Sade to Karl Marx, Camus creates a very

individual argument about the importance of the rebel and a spirited

defence of his assertion that, ‘It is those who know how to rebel, at the

appropriate moment, against history who really advance its interests.’

See also: 100 Must-Read Classic Novels

�Read onThe Myth of Sisyphus; The OutsiderJean-Paul Sartre, Nausea


13

FRITJOF CAPRA

FRITJOF CAPRA (b. 1939) AUSTRIA/USA

THE TURNING POINT (1982)An academic physicist with a long-standing interest in Taoism, Zen

Buddhism and other Eastern religions, Fritjof Capra attempted to marry

his scientific and religious interests in his 1975 book The Tao of Physics.

He was struck by the similarities between the world revealed by cutting-

edge science and the world revealed by the religions of the East, noting

that he was often encountering ‘statements where it is almost

impossible to say whether they have been made by physicists or by

Eastern mystics’. Seven years later, Capra published The Turning Pointin which he expanded his focus beyond the revolution in modern

physics to examine ways in which science and philosophy are moving

away from a mechanistic view of nature and towards a more holistic

one. Just as physicists have been obliged over the course of the

twentieth century to abandon many of their most cherished ideas about

the nature of reality, so too will people working in fields as different as

ecology and psychology, biology and economics, need to leave behind

reductionist models of how the world works. And the rest of us will have

to be prepared to accept a new vision of reality. In place of the old and

tired models, Capra advocates ‘a perception of reality that goes beyond

the scientific framework to an intuitive awareness of the oneness of all

life, the interdependence of its multiple manifestations and its cycles of

change and transformation.’ The consequences if we make the wrong

decisions at ‘the turning point’ will be catastrophic. We are facing ‘a

crisis of a scale and urgency unprecedented in recorded human history’

and outmoded ways of thinking cannot deal with it. The Turning Point


14


was first published a quarter of a century ago and some of its

arguments may now seem outmoded themselves but its central

message about the importance of a holistic vision of life is even more

valid than it once was.

�Read onThe Tao of Physics; Uncommon Wisdom; The Web of LifeGregory Bateson, Mind and Nature; Ilya Prigogine and Isabelle

Stengers, Order Out of Chaos

READONATHEME: NEW PHYSICS, NEW PHILOSOPHY

David Bohm, Wholeness and the Implicate OrderPaul Davies, The Mind of GodDavid Deutsch, The Fabric of RealityWerner Heisenberg, Physics and PhilosophyF. David Peat, Blackfoot Physics Michael Talbot, The Holographic UniverseFrank J. Tipler, The Physics of ImmortalityFred Alan Wolf, The Spiritual UniverseGary Zukav, The Dancing Wu Li Masters


15

RACHEL CARSON

RACHEL CARSON (1907–64) USA

SILENT SPRING (1962)‘The earth’s vegetation,’ Rachel Carson wrote in her 1960s bestseller

Silent Spring, ‘is part of a web of life in which there are intimate and

essential relations between plants and animals. Sometimes we have no

choice but to disturb these relationships, but we should do so

thoughtfully, with full awareness that what we do may have

consequences remote in time and place.’ Today, the thought she

expressed is not an unusual one but she was one of the first people to

bring such thinking to the attention of a wide public. Carson, born on a

small farm in Pennsylvania, grew up to work as a marine biologist for

the US Bureau of Fisheries. Her talents as a popular science writer were

first displayed in books like The Sea Around Us (1951) and The Edge ofthe Sea (1955). The success of these earlier books, widely praised for

their combination of rigorous science and an elegant, lyrical prose style,

enabled her to become a full-time writer and it was then that she began

the research into the pollution of the environment which eventually

resulted in Silent Spring. The specific target of the book was the

irresponsible use of pesticides but Carson’s more general aim was to

highlight the powerful and usually negative impact of human beings on

the natural world. A pioneer of the environmental movement, Rachel

Carson was one of the first people to realise the damage we were doing

to the web of life of which she wrote and, as such, she deserves to be

remembered and honoured. Her profound belief that, ‘the more clearly

we can focus our attention on the wonders and realities of the universe

about us, the less taste we shall have for destruction’ remains an

inspiration more than forty years after her premature death.


16


�Read on

The Edge of the Sea; The Sea Around UsAnnie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek; Loren Eiseley, The ImmenseJourney

READONATHEME: IN TOUCH WITH NATURE

James Hamilton-Paterson, Seven TenthsW.H. Hudson, Green MansionsBarry Lopez, Arctic DreamsPeter Matthiessen, The Snow LeopardGavin Maxwell, Ring of Bright WaterJohn Muir, The Mountains of CaliforniaJohn Stewart Collis, The Worm Forgives the PloughGilbert White, The Natural History of SelborneHenry Williamson, Tarka the Otter

CARLOS CASTANEDA (1925–98) PERU/USA

THE TEACHINGS OF DON JUAN (1968)Carlos Castaneda was an anthropology student at UCLA for much of the

1960s and his first published writings supposedly grew out of field work

he undertook as part of his studies. His books have always been

controversial. They purport to record his travels in the desert regions of


17

CARLOS CASTANEDA

the southwest United States and Mexico and his training, under the

guidance of a Yaqui Indian he calls Don Juan, in the techniques of

shamanism. Many have doubted the reality of Castaneda’s Indian guru

and have questioned the teachings he allegedly passed on. Whatever

the truth about the existence or non-existence of Don Juan and about

the content of Castaneda’s books, there can be no doubt about the

popularity of his writings. People responded in the sixties and seventies

to his message and they continue to do so. At the heart of this message

is the demand that we forget what we think we know about reality.

There is a different order of reality hidden behind the everyday world we

usually inhabit and those with courage can reach it. By means of

initiation rituals, training and psychedelic drugs, Don Juan endeavours

to show his disciple this ‘separate reality’. It is there to be experienced

if only we are prepared to rid ourselves of our egotism and self-

important belief that we are at the centre of things. We are like horses

with blinkers but our blinkers can be removed. ‘For me there is only the

travelling on paths that have heart,’ Don Juan tells Castaneda, ‘on any

path that may have heart. There I travel, and the only worthwhile

challenge is to traverse its full length. And there I travel, looking, looking

breathlessly.’ Through Castaneda’s writings the old shaman invites

those prepared to abandon conventional thinking to join him.

See also: 100 Must-Read Books for Men

�Read onA Separate Reality; Journey to IxtlanTaisha Abelar, The Sorcerers’ Crossing; Don Miguel Ruiz, The FourAgreements; Victor Sanchez, The Teachings of Don Carlos


18


READONATHEME: NATIVE WISDOM

Black Elk, Black Elk SpeaksCharles Eastman, The Soul of the IndianJoan Halifax, Shamanic VoicesMichael Harner, The Way of the ShamanSun Bear, The Medicine WheelHank Wesselman, Spiritwalker

JUNG CHANG (b. 1952) CHINA/UK

WILD SWANS (1992)Jung Chang was born into the new China ruled by Chairman Mao (about

whom she was later to write a highly critical biography) and she grew

up in comparatively privileged circumstances as the daughter of two

leading Communist Party officials. She became a youthful Red Guard

during the Cultural Revolution but, as she witnessed the violence and

the public humiliation of many teachers and officials (including her own

parents) that it encouraged, she grew rapidly disillusioned with its

supposed progress. In 1978, after the political rehabilitation of her

father, she became one of the few students from the People’s Republic

to be allowed to attend a university in Britain and, although she has

returned regularly to her native country, she has lived in the West since

then. Wild Swans was published in 1992 and became a worldwide


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JUNG CHANG

bestseller. In her book Jung Chang brilliantly and vividly captures the

history of China in the 20th century through stories of the lives of three

women – her grandmother, her mother and herself. All three experi -

enced terrible upheaval and human suffering. Jung Chang’s grand -

mother was sold as a concubine to a warlord during the years of chaos

that followed the collapse of the Manchu Empire; her mother lived

through the turmoil of the war between Japan and China, with its

massacres and colossal loss of life; and Jung Chang herself, of course,

witnessed the excesses of the Cultural Revolution. Wild Swans provides

an unflinching record of what the Chinese people have had to endure

over the last hundred years but it is far from being a depressing or a

dispiriting book. Horror and heartbreak fill its pages but readers will

also emerge from them with a renewed sense of the strength of the

human spirit to persist and prevail in the worst of circumstances.

�Read onMao: The Unknown Story (with Jon Halliday)

Adeline Yen Mah, Falling Leaves; Aiping Mu, Vermilion Gate; Xinran,

The Good Women of China


20


PAULO COELHO (b. 1947) BRAZIL

THE ALCHEMIST (1988/1993)In terms of sales alone, Paulo Coelho is South America’s most

successful novelist ever, his work translated into dozens of languages

and selling millions of copies worldwide. Sophisticated critics may find

it easy to deride his parable-like stories and the simple language in

which he tells them but he clearly reaches out to readers in search of

fiction that combines page-turning narrative with a spiritual message.

Coelho has published more than twenty books, including the story of a

woman who is strangely liberated by her decision to commit suicide

(Veronika Decides to Die), a version of the biblical story of Elijah (TheFifth Mountain) and the tale of a prostitute’s sexual odyssey in search

of true love (Eleven Minutes). However, his best-known work remains

The Alchemist, first published in Brazil in 1988 and translated into

English five years later. Subtitled ‘A Fable About Following Your Dreams’,

this heartening story of Santiago, an Andalusian shepherd boy who

dreams of a treasure in far off Egypt and sets off in search of it, has long

been an international bestseller. During his travels, Santiago meets with

people who assist him, whether consciously or unconsciously, with his

quest and eventually he encounters an alchemist in the desert who

becomes his guru and opens his eyes to the true values of life, love and

suffering. At the end of the journey, Santiago learns that the treasure he

has been pursuing is not at all what he first imagined but he realises

that his pilgrimage has had its own intrinsic value, irrespective of what

was to be found at its end. During his travels he has become reconciled

to his own self and learned to recognise his own purpose in life. As


21

CHARLES DARWIN

Coelho writes, ‘The boy and his heart had become friends and neither

was capable now of betraying the other.’

�Read onThe Gift; By the River Piedra I Sat Down and Wept; The ZahirMitch Albom, Tuesdays with Morrie; Deborah Morrison, Nexus

CHARLES DARWIN (1809–82) UK

THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES (1859)Described by the geneticist Steve Jones as ‘the only bestseller to change

man’s conception of himself’, On the Origin of Species by Means ofNatural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in theStruggle for Life (to give it the full title it had on first publication) is

perhaps unique among undoubtedly paradigm-breaking scientific

works in that it can be read with pleasure by a non-scientist. Darwin’s

subject-matter and his own lucid prose mean that the best way for a

general reader to understand the argument Darwin was presenting is to

read the original book. In The Origin of Species, Darwin argues that

species are not, as was assumed at the time, fixed. They evolve over

long periods of time. This evolution takes place because, in the struggle

to survive and propagate, those organisms best adapted to their

environments will ultimately succeed and those less well adapted will

die out. As the environment changes, so species will change by a

process of ‘natural selection’. The naturally occurring variations on


22


which this selection depends are random and not the result of any

divine plan, as religious thinkers might argue. The view of nature and

man’s place in it that the theory of evolution implies is not necessarily

a comforting one. Many people, both at the time that Darwin first made

his theory public and in the century and a half since, have found it

impossible to accept. Yet it is not a petty or a reductionist vision of the

universe that unfolds if basic evolutionary ideas are assumed. As

Darwin himself wrote at the conclusion of his great work, ‘There is

grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been

originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this

planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so

simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful

have been, and are being, evolved.’

�Read onThe Descent of Man; The Voyage of the BeagleRichard Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker; Steve Jones, Almost Like aWhale

RICHARD DAWKINS (b. 1941) KENYA/UK

THE GOD DELUSION (2006)Richard Dawkins was born in Kenya and moved to England with his

family when he was a boy. Much of his life has been spent at Oxford

where he has been undergraduate, graduate student, lecturer in zoology

and, since 1995, Professor of Public Understanding of Science. In 1976 he


23

RICHARD DAWKINS

published his first book, The Selfish Gene, which became a major

popular and critical success and, with its title, added a new expression

to the English language. Since then, he has published several more

books which have explained Darwinian and evolutionary ideas to the

general public (The Blind Watchmaker, Climbing Mount Improbable)

but, in recent years, he has become most famous as the scourge of

theologians and religious believers everywhere. When Napoleon asked

the mathematician Pierre-Simon Laplace why there was no mention of

God in his latest book, the French savant loftily replied, ‘Sire, I had no

need of that hypothesis.’ Like Laplace, Dawkins has no need of that

hypothesis. Indeed that hypothesis seems to outrage him and The GodDelusion is directed against those who still cling to it. It is a no-holds-

barred assault on religious belief that pours scorn on the idea that there

is a divine designer of the universe and lambasts the often pernicious

influence of religion on modern society. Instead it champions the elegant

simplicity of Darwin’s theory of evolution which Dawkins firmly believes

to be sufficient explanation for the diversity of life. His book,

unsurprisingly, has not been universally popular despite its bestseller

status. He has been accused of indulging in an atheist variety of the very

fundamentalism he condemns in others. Yet The God Delusion, written

with the same wit and cleverness that characterises all of Dawkins’s

other books, is one of the most powerful polemics published in recent

years. After reading it, the traditional idea of an all-knowing and all-

seeing God may seem as sensible as belief in Father Christmas.

�Read onThe Blind Watchmaker; Unweaving the RainbowSam Harris, The End of Faith; Christopher Hitchens, God Is Not Great


24


SIMONE DE BEAUVOIR (1908–86) FRANCE

THE SECOND SEX (1949/1953)Simone de Beauvoir is remembered for her central role in the French

philosophical movement known as existentialism and for her lifelong

association with Jean-Paul Sartre which began when she was a student

at the Sorbonne in Paris and he was attending the École Normale

Supérieure in the same city. In their lifetimes it was Sartre who had the

greater fame but, two decades after de Beauvoir’s death, it could well

be argued that it is her reputation and her influence that have lasted the

best. Her works range from semi-autobiographical novels (TheMandarins, for example) and volumes of memoirs to philosophical

essays and political tracts. However, the book which has done most to

ensure her place in the history of 20th century thought is undoubtedly

The Second Sex, a long analysis of the position of women in history and

society which was written in the years immediately following the

Second World War. Famous for its assertion that, ‘One is not born, but

rather becomes, a woman’, The Second Sex is one of the founding texts

of modern feminism. De Beauvoir’s fundamental argument in the book

is that, throughout history, societies have seen humanity in male terms.

As she wrote, ‘Man is defined as a human being and a woman as a

female – whenever she behaves as a human being she is said to imitate

the male.’ In other words, the human ‘norm’ is male and the female is

somehow the ‘other’. In making her case, de Beauvoir draws on a wide

range of disciplines from anthropology and sociology to philosophy

and history, demonstrating both a prodigious erudition and a skill in

posing the most awkward questions about gender and sexuality in the


25

JARED DIAMOND

most powerful and direct way. Nearly six decades after it first appeared

in French, The Second Sex remains one of the classic manifestos of

twentieth-century feminism.

�Read onThe Mandarins (fiction); Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter; The Prime ofLife; Force of Circumstance; All Said and Done (four volumes of

memoirs)

Judith Butler, Gender Trouble; Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique

JARED DIAMOND (b. 1937) USA

GUNS, GERMS AND STEEL (1997)A polymath in an age of specialisation, Jared Diamond has made major

contributions to knowledge in subjects as diverse as ornithology and

human evolution and written bestselling books for the general reader

which range widely across disciplines in order to construct thought-

provoking theses about the history of man and the history of civi -

lisations. In The Rise and Fall of the Third Chimpanzee, he looked at

human history in the light of our animal biology and its continuing

influence. In Guns, Germs and Steel, he asked a very basic historical

question. Why is it that for the last 500 years the civilisations of the west

have been in the ascendant and have shaped the world in which we

live? Or, as a New Guinea friend of Diamond once asked, ‘Why is it that

you white people developed so much cargo and brought it to New


26


Guinea but we black people had little cargo of our own?’ In the past,

arguments have been put forward that depended on assumptions of

racial superiority. In his ambitious book, Diamond combines history and

science to advance a less pernicious explanation. Going back

thousands of years into prehistory, he traces the biogeographical

reasons behind the rise of agriculture and the domestication of

animals, and the consequences these had for the development of

settled societies and more complex civilisations. He explains why

Europe and Eurasia were, by chance, the most suitable areas for the

encouragement of these trends and places our modern history in a

much broader context. ‘History followed different courses for different

peoples,’ he writes, ‘because of differences among peoples’ environ -

ments, not because of biological differences among peoples

themselves.’ In Guns, Germs and Steel, Diamond ranges boldly and

confidently through a number of intellectual disciplines in order to

produce an immensely thought-provoking book, one which can make

readers look at the whole of human history in a different way.

�Read onCollapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed; The Rise and Fallof the Third ChimpanzeeJohn Darwin, After Tamerlane: The Rise and Fall of Global Empires;

Felipe Fernandez-Armesto, Civilizations


27

PHILIP K. DICK

PHILIP K. DICK (1928–82) USA

THE MAN IN THE HIGH CASTLE (1962)A recurring theme in popular culture recently (and indeed in the more

esoteric realms of academic philosophy) is the notion that ‘reality’ is

nothing more than a construct and that behind it lurk other, possibly

darker truths about the nature of the world in which we live. However,

before there was The Truman Show and The Matrix, before people

began to speculate that we might be living in a computer-generated

reality, there was Philip K. Dick. Dick, whose work is usually categorised

(and sometimes dismissed) as science fiction, wrote books which can

still disconcert, disorient and delight readers decades after first

publication. Of these, one of the most remarkable is The Man in theHigh Castle. The rewriting of history is a standard idea in science fiction

and, at first glance, The Man in the High Castle seems a standard

example of the subgenre. The Axis powers have won the Second World

War and the Japanese and the Germans rule the USA between them. Yet

Dick’s book soon reveals itself as far more complicated and subtle than

a straightforward work of alternative history. It is an interlocking,

intermeshing web of possible realities. One of the central characters

has written a bestseller in which the Allies won the war and the world

looks more like the one we know. An alternate history lies within an

alternate history. Who can be sure what the ‘true’ reality is? Dick plays

increasingly complicated games with the idea of ‘history’ and how

accepted versions of it come to be created. When he published TheMan in the High Castle, Dick had already written other novels (TimeOut of Joint, for example) which investigated the nature of reality and


28


he went on to produce many other works with a similar theme but this

1962 narrative of alternative history remains his masterpiece.


�Read onDo Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?; Time Out of Joint; ValisAlfred Bester, The Demolished Man; Philip Roth, The Plot AgainstAmerica; Norman Spinrad, The Iron Dream

FREDERICK DOUGLASS (1818–95) USA

NARRATIVE OF THE LIFE OF FREDERICK DOUGLASS, AN AMERICAN SLAVE (1845)In the course of an extraordinary life, Frederick Douglass travelled from

slavery to a position as one of the most eminent and eloquent

campaigners for black freedom and human rights in the nineteenth

century. He was born in Maryland, the son of Harriet Bailey, who was a

slave, and (in all likelihood) a white father. He was separated from his

mother at a very early age and was looked after by his grandmother on

a plantation until, still a small child, he was despatched to a new owner

in Baltimore. It was his new owner’s wife who, contrary to state law,

taught him to read and write and thus unwittingly provided him with the

means to change his life. In 1838, while working in a shipyard in

Baltimore, he fled the city and made his way to New York where he took


29

FREDERICK DOUGLASS

the name of Douglass, married and (some years later) met the

abolitionist and anti-slavery campaigner William Lloyd Garrison. It was

Garrison who inspired Douglass to speak at abolitionist meetings and

to write the book that was published in 1845 as Narrative of the Life ofFrederick Douglass, an American Slave and immediately became a

bestseller. Douglass went on to write two further volumes of auto -

biography and to edit his own abolitionist newspaper, The North Star.

For the rest of his life, he remained one of the most powerful and

compelling advocates of the rights of his fellow African-Americans. His

autobiographies reflect the man he was. In a speech delivered towards

the end of his life, he said that, ‘No man can put a chain about the ankle

of his fellow man without at last finding the other end fastened about

his own neck.’ In his knowledge that slavery diminishes both slave and

owner and in his profound belief in the importance of freedom for all

men, Frederick Douglass remains an inspiration more than a century

after his death.

�Read onMy Bondage and My Freedom; Life and Times of Frederick Douglass(the two later versions of his life that Douglass wrote, publishing them

in 1855 and 1881 respectively)

W.E. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk; Harriet Beecher Stowe, UncleTom’s Cabin


30


READONATHEME: UP FROM SLAVERY

Olaudah Equiano, The Interesting Narrative of the Life ofOlaudah Equiano

Harriet Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave GirlElizabeth Keckley, Behind the Scenes, or Thirty Years a Slave

and Four Years in the White HouseMary Prince, The History of Mary PrinceSojourner Truth, The Narrative of Sojourner TruthBooker T. Washington, Up from SlaveryHarriet E. Wilson, Our NigNorman R. Yetman (ed), When I Was a Slave; Memoirs from the

Slave Narrative Collection

SEBASTIAN FAULKS (b. 1953) UK

BIRDSONG (1993)In 1910 a young Englishman named Stephen Wraysford arrives in

Amiens to stay with the Azaire family. Soon he is embarked on a

convention-defying affair with Madame Azaire and, when it is

discovered, the two leave Amiens together. The affair does not last and

Stephen is left a cold and empty man by its failure, uncaring of what the

future might hold for him. What it holds are the trenches of the Great


31

SEBASTIAN FAULKS

War. He becomes an officer and takes part in Ypres, the Somme and

other major battles of the war, watching men die horribly all around him

and discovering in himself a surprisingly steely determination to

survive. As the northern France he knew before the war becomes both

a quagmire and a slaughterhouse, his past relationship with Madame

Azaire resurfaces in an unexpected and disturbing way. Sebastian

Faulks has written a number of very good novels in his career. CharlotteGray, set in the Second World War, tells the story of a young woman

journeying into France in search of her lover, and Human Traces is a

massively ambitious saga which follows the fortunes of two pioneering

psychiatrists. None, however, has matched the power of Birdsong nor

enjoyed its commercial and critical success. It is not difficult to work out

the reasons why this novel of love and war has proved such a triumph

for him. The power of his writing, both in its evocation of the passionate

affair and in its descriptions of the claustrophobia and terror of the

trenches, is remarkable. He succeeds both in conveying the comrade -

ship of men in battle and in precisely observing the ebb and flow of an

intense romantic relationship. Few modern novels capture readers’

imaginations so fully as Birdsong does. It shows individuals trapped by

historical events over which they have no control and poignantly records

their efforts to retain their humanity in inhumane circumstances.

�Read onCharlotte Gray; Human TracesPat Barker, Regeneration (and its successors The Eye in the Door and

The Ghost Road); Louis de Bernières, Captain Corelli’s Mandolin; Erich

Maria Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front


32


ANNE FRANK (1929–45) THE NETHERLANDS

THE DIARY OF ANNE FRANK (1947/1952)The heart-rending story of how a young Jewish girl from Amsterdam hid

with her family from the Nazis until they were found and sent to a

concentration camp became an instant classic when it was first

published in English in 1952. More than half a century later the story of

a teenager coming to maturity in the most terrible of circumstances

remains profoundly moving. Anne Frank was actually born in Germany

but her family moved to Holland when she was a small child. She was

11 years old when the Germans occupied the Netherlands and 13 when

the Franks, together with four fellow Jews, went into hiding in a small set

of rooms above the premises used by her father’s business. They stayed

there for just over two years until someone betrayed their hiding place

to the Nazis. The Franks were arrested and transported first to the small

concentration camp of Westerbork and then to Auschwitz. Anne and her

sister Margot were transferred to Belsen where they both died in a

typhus epidemic in March of 1945, only weeks before the camp was

liberated by Allied troops. Her father, Otto Frank, survived his time in

Auschwitz and, after the war, it was he who retrieved his daughter’s

diary, written during her 24 months in hiding, and arranged its

publication. Anne Frank became perhaps the best-known of all victims

of the Holocaust and her words continue to be read decades after her

death. ‘It’s difficult in times like these: ideals, dreams and cherished

hopes rise within us, only to be crushed by grim reality,’ she wrote. ‘It’s

a wonder I haven’t abandoned all my ideals, they seem so absurd and

impractical. Yet I cling to them because I still believe, in spite of

everything, that people are truly good at heart.’


33

VICTOR FRANKL

�Read onTales from the Secret AnnexeMary Berg, The Diary of Mary Berg; Livia Bitton-Jackson, I Have Liveda Thousand Years; Janusz Korczak, Ghetto Diary

VICTOR FRANKL (1905–97) AUSTRIA

MAN’S SEARCH FOR MEANING (1946/1959)Victor Frankl was born into a prominent Jewish family in Vienna and,

after studying medicine at university, he specialised in psychiatry,

showing a particular interest in the still controversial ideas of

psychoanalysts like Freud and Adler. Before the Anschluss of 1938, the

Nazi annexation of Austria, Frankl had already won a reputation as a

pioneering specialist in the treatment of suicidal patients but, under the

anti-semitic legislation of the Nazis, he found it increasingly difficult to

work. Eventually, in 1942, he was arrested and, together with most of

the members of his close family, he was despatched to a concentration

camp. Frankl survived the war; most of his family, including his wife and

his parents, did not. His 1946 book, translated as Man’s Search forMeaning, chronicled his experiences in the war and is the founding text

of his school of psychotherapy, usually known as ‘logotherapy’. The

book’s original German title (‘… trotzdem ja zum Leben sagen’) can be

literally translated as ‘Saying Yes to Life Regardless’ and that provides

as precise a summary of Frankl’s ideas as it is possible to get. At the

heart of logotherapy is the idea that life has meaning even in the midst


34


of terrible suffering and that the urge to find that meaning and assert it

provides the most fundamental motivation for living. Frankl’s experi -

ences in the Holocaust both tested his theories in the most extreme of

circumstances and enabled him to refine and develop them. As he

wrote, ‘We have come to know man as he really is.’ ‘Man,’ he went on to

say, ‘is that being who invented the gas chambers of Auschwitz;

however, he is also that being who entered those gas chambers

upright, with the Lord’s Prayer or the Shema Yisrael on his lips.’

�Read onMan’s Search for Ultimate MeaningRollo May, Love and Will; Carl Rogers, On Becoming a Person

SIGMUND FREUD (1856–1939) AUSTRIA

THE INTERPRETATION OF DREAMS (1900/1913)Sigmund Freud was born in the small Moravian town of Freiburg and his

family moved to Vienna when he was four years old. He lived there until

he was an old man of eighty-two, through all the years in which he

slowly elaborated his theories about sexuality, the unconscious mind

and the hidden motives behind human action. Only when the Nazis

marched into Vienna in 1938 and Freud, as both a Jew and a supposedly

‘decadent’ thinker, found his life was in danger, did he move from the

city, going into exile in London where he died in the following year.

Freud’s contribution to modern thought is almost incalculable. His


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SIGMUND FREUD

influence permeates our culture to such an extent that it is perfectly

possible to be aware of Freudian ideas without ever having read a book

by him. Which of his many published works, however, is the most

significant? Freud himself was certain enough. Dreams were the

gateways to the unconscious mind or, as he put it, ‘The interpretation of

dreams is the royal road to a knowledge of the unconscious activities of

the mind.’ And his book The Interpretation of Dreams included some

of his profoundest thinking. ‘Insights such as this,’ he wrote, ‘fall to

one’s lot but once in a lifetime.’ In his monumental work on dreams, he

provides a route map of the royal roads to the unconscious. He reveals

how we disguise our true motivations and desires, the ‘latent’ content

of the dream, behind its ‘manifest’ content (what we remember of it)

and how we can access our hidden selves. Dreams, with all their

mysteries and ambiguities, have always haunted us. Thanks to Freud

we have new ways of understanding them and of using them to learn

more about our secret thoughts and longings. After Freud, we can never

quite see ourselves as we once did.

�Read onCivilization and Its Discontents; Three Essays on the Theory ofSexualityC.G. Jung, Dreams


36


ERICH FROMM (1900–80) GERMANY/USA

THE ART OF LOVING (1956)Born in Frankfurt and educated there and at Heidelberg University,

Fromm trained as a psychoanalyst in the 1920s and was already a

respected practitioner in Germany when the Nazis came to power in

1933. As a Jew, he was under an immediate threat both personally and

professionally and he moved first to Switzerland and then to the USA.

He spent the rest of his working life as an academic in American

universities. Fromm was a prolific writer and his works range from TheFear of Freedom and The Sane Society, which examine the structures

of modern society from a psychological perspective, to books on Marx,

Freud and the links between psychoanalysis and Zen Buddhism.

However, his most lasting legacy may well prove to be a short book he

wrote in the 1950s in which he explored the nature of love and its

capacity to alter lives for the better. The Art of Loving is not the kind of

simplistic self-help book that the title might immediately suggest.

Rather it is a clear-sighted exploration of what love (from brotherly love,

the love of one’s fellows which Fromm believed formed the basis for all

other love, to erotic love) might be. In Fromm’s eyes, modern society

and modern capitalism work to undermine the many different varieties

of love and encourage the kind of selfishness and alienation from

others that is love’s very antithesis. Only through hard work and self-

examination can people achieve the capacity for genuine and fulfilling

love. Fromm argues that, although it provides no magic answers to life’s

difficulties and although our expectations of it are often unrealistic,

then none the less ‘Love is the only sane and satisfactory answer to the


37

JOSTEIN GAARDER

problem of human existence.’ For more than fifty years readers of TheArt of Loving have found truth in his assertion.

�Read onThe Fear of Freedom; The Sane Society; To Have or To BeJohn Armstrong, Conditions of Love; Thomas Lewis, A General Theoryof Love

JOSTEIN GAARDER (b. 1952) NORWAY

SOPHIE’S WORLD (1991/1995)Jostein Gaarder is a onetime philosophy teacher who has become one

of Scandinavia’s most popular writers for both children and adults. His

best-known work, first published in Norway in 1991 and in the UK four

years later, is Sophie’s World. This focuses on a fourteen-year-old

Norwegian girl named Sophie Amundsen whose life is turned upside

down when she finds notes in her mailbox posing two questions: Who

are you? Where does the world come from? In attempting to find

answers to them, she becomes involved with an enigmatic middle-aged

gentleman called Alberto Knox who takes her on a whistlestop tour of

world philosophy from Plato to modern physics. In many ways,

Sophie’s World is an unlikely candidate for bestseller status. The plot

of the novel sometimes seems a perfunctory excuse for introducing

Alberto’s philosophy lessons. The book really is as much a guide to

western philosophy as it is a compelling story. And yet something in


38


Gaarder’s narrative spoke very directly to its millions of readers.

Probably the secret of its success lies in its ability to strip away the

unnecessary complexities and over-elaborations that so often attach

themselves to the subject of philosophy and to reveal the fundamentals

beneath. Philosophy is not (or should not be) primarily about ideas that

are only accessible to academics or intellectuals. It asks the basic

questions that occur to any human being who has ever thought about

the world and his or her place in it. And it attempts to find open-ended

answers that will help us all to make sense of our experiences. At one

point in the novel, Sophie is told that, ‘The only thing we require to be

good philosophers is the faculty of wonder’. Jostein Gaarder’s great

achievement is that his story succeeds in stimulating and encouraging

that faculty.

�Read onMaya; The Solitaire MysteryAlain de Botton, How Proust Can Change Your Life; Catherine Clement,

Theo’s Odyssey


39

MOHANDAS K. GANDHI

READONATHEME: GREAT THINKERS, GREAT IDEAS

Soren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling John Stuart Mill, On LibertyMichel de Montaigne, EssaysThomas Paine, Common SenseBlaise Pascal, PenséesPlato, The SymposiumJean Jacques Rousseau, The Social ContractBertrand Russell, The Conquest of Happiness

MOHANDAS K. GANDHI (1869–1948) INDIA

THE STORY OF MY EXPERIMENTS WITH TRUTH(1927–29)Today Gandhi is remembered as the charismatic Indian leader whose

method of non-violent resistance to oppression (satyagraha) played a

major role in forcing the British Raj to grant independence to his

country. It was an independence that the Mahatma was not able to

experience for long – he was assassinated in January 1948 by a Hindu

extremist outraged by his willingness to tolerate non-Hindus in the new

India – but he continues to be a revered figure throughout the nation


40


that he did so much to create. However, his autobiography, originally

entitled The Story of My Experiments with Truth, was first written and

published some time before he achieved the iconic, indeed almost

saintly status he was granted during his last years. The book is not a

conventional autobiography. Indeed some readers might argue that it is

not an autobiography at all. It draws upon his experiences in life but its

focus, as its title suggests, is upon his search for truth. To Gandhi the

only path to truth was one which turned its back on egotism. ‘The

seeker after truth should be humbler than dust,’ he wrote. ‘The world

crushes the dust under its feet, but the seeker after truth should so

humble himself that even the dust could crush him. Only then, and not

till then, will he have a glimpse of truth.’ Through the simple living, the

self-purification and the spiritual commitment which he chronicles in

his book, Gandhi hoped to gain a glimpse of the truth himself. The

British politician Sir Stafford Cripps, paying tribute to him after his

assassination, said that he knew of no other man ‘who so convincingly

demonstrated the power of the spirit over material things’. That power

is quietly and undemonstratively revealed in Gandhi’s ‘autobiography’.

�Read onLouis Fischer, The Life of Mahatma Gandhi; John Ruskin, Unto ThisLast; Rabindranath Tagore, Gitanjali


41

KAHLIL GIBRAN

KAHLIL GIBRAN (1883–1931) LEBANON/USA

THE PROPHET (1923)Born into a Christian Maronite community in the Lebanon, then part of

the Ottoman Empire, Kahlil Gibran travelled with his mother and his

siblings to America in 1895 in search of a better life. He was to return to

Lebanon in the years to come and spent time in Europe but essentially

America became his home. In the early years of the twentieth century,

Gibran suffered devastating loss, with the deaths of his mother and two

of his siblings, but he also came to the attention of an older woman

who was to be his patron for the rest of his life. Mary Haskell, a

respected teacher and educator in Boston, encouraged his creative

work. Before 1918, this work consisted largely of paintings and poetry in

Arabic but, determined to reach as wide an audience as possible, he

began later to write in English. Books such as The Madman (1918) and

The Forerunner (1920) followed but Gibran’s biggest success by far

came with The Prophet, a volume which has become one of the

bestselling inspirational books of all time. These poetic essays on the

meaning of life record the wisdom of a mysterious prophet, about to

embark on a journey, who has nothing to offer the people gathered to

witness his departure but the answers to the questions each of them

puts to him. In the rich and resonant language his creator gives him, the

prophet reveals his thoughts on everything in life from love and

marriage to the enigmas of birth and death. In one of the sections of

The Prophet, Gibran wrote that, ‘You give but little when you give of

your possessions./It is when you give of yourself that you truly give.’

Through his writings, his own gift of himself continues to be

appreciated by readers decades after his untimely death.


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�Read onThe Madman; The ForerunnerDag Hammarskjold, Markings; Anne Morrow Lindbergh, Gift from theSea; Rumi, Selected Poems; Rabindranath Tagore, Gitanjali

JEAN GIONO (1895–1970) FRANCE

THE MAN WHO PLANTED TREES (1954)In a literary career that lasted for more than forty years, Jean Giono won

much acclaim. Particularly in his native France, his historical fiction (TheHorseman on the Roof) and his powerful, unsentimental novels set in

the Provençal countryside which he loved (Second Harvest, Song ofthe World) are considered twentieth-century classics. Yet it could easily

be argued that his most remarkable and long-lasting achievement is a

short parable, published in France in 1953, which first appeared in an

English translation in the magazine Vogue the following year. The ManWho Planted Trees consists of less than 5,000 words but it is a story

that, once read, remains in the mind and imagination. It opens in 1910

when the unnamed narrator is hiking through some of the wilder

regions of Provence. In a remote and treeless valley he comes across a

shepherd named Elzéard Bouffier. Bouffier has undertaken the self-

imposed task of revivifying the barren land. He is planting thousands

and thousands of trees. Over the decades, the narrator returns

occasionally to Bouffier’s valley and is witness to its startling

transformation. When Bouffier dies, nearly four decades after his first


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MALCOLM GLADWELL

meeting with the narrator, the once desolate valley is a green and

pleasant Eden. Translated into many languages, The Man Who PlantedTrees has become by far Giono’s most widely read and most loved

work. In the final analysis it succeeds so well with readers all around the

world because its message is an optimistic and uplifting one. One man,

it says, can make a difference. As the narrator remarks, ‘When I reflect

that one man, armed only with his own physical and moral resources,

was able to cause this land of Canaan to spring from the wasteland, I

am convinced that in spite of everything, humanity is admirable.’

�Read onSecond HarvestRoger Deakin, Wildwood: A Journey Through Trees; Marcel Pagnol,

Jean de Florette

MALCOLM GLADWELL (b. 1963) UK/CANADA

THE TIPPING POINT (2000)Some books change us as individuals; others change the way in which

we look at the world. Of books in the latter category published in the

last decade, one of the most eye-opening has been Malcolm Gladwell’s

The Tipping Point. After reading it, a whole host of social phenomena

seem more readily explicable than they did before. Gladwell argues that

the best way of understanding many of the things that happen in

contemporary society – from the dramatic success of Harry Potter to


44


change in the patterns of violent crime – is to think of them as behaving

like epidemics. Certain ideas and products and behaviours spread like

a virus. They pass from person to person and, like epidemics, they can

gather momentum very rapidly and then suddenly surge through

society. They have a ‘tipping point’, a point at which they reach critical

mass and become almost unstoppable. His central idea owes much to

Richard Dawkins’s theory of the ‘meme’, first formulated in The SelfishGene, but Gladwell takes it and gives it new and unexpected appli -

cations. He provides his readers with a new and surprisingly powerful

tool for decoding the world around them and making sense of it. The

idea of social behaviour as an epidemic may seem disconcerting or

even distressing but, as Gladwell is eager to point out, it is ultimately an

optimistic one. His book is about change and how change happens.

And one of its central arguments is that large-scale change can often be

the result of changes at a microcosmic level. However powerless the

individual might seem to be, he or she can make a difference in the

world Gladwell describes. ‘What must underlie successful epidemics, in

the end,’ he writes, ‘is a bedrock belief that change is possible, that

people can radically transform their behaviour or beliefs in the face of

the right kind of impetus.’

�Read onBlinkSusan Blackmore, The Meme Machine; Richard Dawkins, The SelfishGene; Steven D. Levitt & Stephen J. Dubner, Freakonomics


45

DANIEL GOLEMAN

READONATHEME: SOCIETY WILL NEVER SEEM THE SAME

Chris Anderson, The Long TailThomas Friedman, The World Is FlatTim Harford, The Logic of LifeNoreena Hertz, The Silent TakeoverClay Shirky, Here Comes EverybodyJames Surowiecki, The Wisdom of CrowdsDon Tapscott & Anthony D. Williams, WikinomicsRichard H. Thaler, Nudge

DANIEL GOLEMAN (b. 1946) USA

EMOTIONAL INTELLIGENCE (1995)The son of two academics, Goleman grew up in California and went on

to receive a doctorate in psychology from Harvard. For many years he

was a science journalist, writing on the brain and behavioural sciences

for the New York Times and publishing a well-received book on the

psychology of meditation. In 1995, he produced a worldwide bestseller

in Emotional Intelligence, a book that, with its argument that good

emotional skills are more important in creating a successful life than

traditional notions of IQ, struck a chord with millions of readers.


46


Goleman highlighted the dangers both of unthinking indulgence in

emotions and of alienation from one’s own feelings and those of

others. ‘If your emotional abilities aren’t in hand,’ he wrote, ‘if you don’t

have self-awareness, if you are not able to manage your distressing

emotions, if you can’t have empathy and have effective relationships,

then no matter how smart you are, you are not going to get very far.’ In

many ways, the concept of ‘Emotional Intelligence’ emerges from the

observation of everyday life (surely we all know of individuals who

either act disastrously on impulse or who have intellectual capacities

which outrun their abilities to interact with others) but Goleman’s book

provides scientific backing for commonsense. And it also provides the

kind of advice on ways to improve our lives that the best self-help

books do. The structure of our brains may not have changed much over

millennia and, in many ways, our feelings may well be better designed

for life in the prehistoric era rather than the post-modern world but we

need not despair. We can unlearn some emotions and we can encour -

age others and, by doing so, we can gain a control over our lives that

we did not previously have. There is a practical optimism in EmotionalIntelligence which goes a long way towards explaining its success.

�Read onSocial Intelligence; Working with Emotional IntelligenceStephen R. Covey, The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People;

Thomas Harris, I’m OK, You’re OK


47

GERMAINE GREER

GERMAINE GREER (b. 1939) AUSTRALIA/UK

THE FEMALE EUNUCH (1970)Germaine Greer, educated at the Universities of Melbourne, Sydney and

Cambridge, was working as a lecturer in English literature and as a

journalist for the underground press when the publication of TheFemale Eunuch turned her into one of the intellectual stars of the so-

called ‘second wave’ of feminism. Much of the attention the book

attracted was the result of its uncompromising statements about male

misogyny (‘Women have very little idea how much men hate them’, for

example) but, at its heart is the wish that women would embrace the

chance for true freedom that the times seemed to offer them. ‘The fear

of freedom is strong in us,’ Greer wrote. ‘We call it chaos or anarchy, and

the words are threatening.’ Her book is a demand that women should

ignore the fear and plunge into the scarily exciting world that freedom

from conventional ideas about femininity and the relationships

between the sexes opened up. Since the publication of The FemaleEunuch, Germaine Greer has enjoyed a long and often controversial

career. She has written on a vast range of subjects from female painters

and the barriers placed in their path throughout the centuries (TheObstacle Race) to women’s experiences of the menopause (TheChange), her own early life in Australia (Daddy, We Hardly Knew You)

and the relationship between Shakespeare and Anne Hathaway

(Shakespeare’s Wife). Whatever the subject on which she chooses to

write, she brings her own highly distinctive intelligence and sensibility

to bear upon it but, nearly four decades after it was first published, TheFemale Eunuch remains her most challenging book. The wittiest of all


48


feminist polemics, it continues to be a liberating read for women (and

men), charting the ways in which traditional, patriarchal ideas about the

relations between the sexes oppress us all.

�Read onThe Whole Woman (‘This sequel to The Female Eunuch is the book I

said I would never write,’ as Greer wrote)

Shulamith Firestone, The Dialectic of Sex; Gloria Steinem, OutrageousActs and Everyday Rebellions

READONATHEME: WOMANPOWER

Betty Friedan, The Second StageBell Hooks, Ain’t I a Woman?Kate Millett, Sexual PoliticsAdrienne Rich, Of Woman BornSheila Rowbotham, Woman’s Consciousness, Man’s WorldDale Spender, Women of Ideas (And What Men Have Done to

Them)Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman


49

G.I. GURDJIEFF

G.I. GURDJIEFF (1872?–1949) ARMENIA

MEETINGS WITH REMARKABLE MEN (1963)Much about Gurdjieff’s early life is mysterious (even the exact date of

his birth is unknown) but he is said to have spent long periods of it

travelling in the Middle East, India and Central Asia, learning about

various spiritual traditions. He began his career as teacher and guru in

Tsarist Russia but was forced into flight and eventual exile by the

upheaval of the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917. By the mid-1920s, he had

settled in Paris where he spent most of the rest of his life and where he

created establishments such as the ‘Institute for the Harmonious

Development of Man’ to propagate his ideas. At the heart of his

philosophy is the notion that most people are not fully awake to the

realities of existence and that they sleepwalk their way through life.

‘Man lives his life in sleep, and in sleep he dies’, he is quoted as saying

in a book by his leading disciple, P.D. Ouspensky. The work of self-

development which Gurdjieff proposed involved techniques that would

promote awareness of the self and of the world and would awaken the

individual to a fuller experience of reality. Meetings with RemarkableMen, first published after Gurdjieff’s death, is a strange hybrid of a

book, an eclectic mix of travel literature, memoir and spiritual advice

that reflects the unusual personality of its author. To some, it reveals

that he was essentially a charlatan; to others, it is the best introduction

to a man who was one of the great spiritual teachers of the twentieth

century. ‘Knowledge and understanding are quite different,’ Gurdjieff

wrote in its pages. ‘Only understanding can lead to being, whereas

knowledge is but a passing presence in it.’ For those who admire his


50


work, Gurdjieff’s writings provide a direct path to that kind of

understanding.

�Read onBeelzebub’s Tales to His Grandson; Life is Real Only Then, When I AmP.D. Ouspensky, The Fourth Way

ALEX HALEY (1921–92) USA

ROOTS (1976)In 1976, Alex Haley, a former officer in the US Coast Guard and star

interviewer for Playboy, published a book which claimed to trace back

his family to an eighteenth-century African named Kunta Kinte who had

been captured by slavers and brought to America to work in the

plantations. The book was Roots and it became a bestseller. The TV

mini-series based on it was equally successful. In the thirty years since

its first publication, Roots has had plenty of critics. Doubts have been

expressed about the validity of Haley’s research and his success in

identifying his genuine slave ancestor, the village in Africa from which

he came and the ship on which he was taken to America has been

questioned. Many would say that the book is largely a work of the

imagination rather than historical scholarship. Nonetheless it is difficult

to deny the significance of Haley’s work. For millions and millions of

African-Americans, Roots provided a new pride in their ancestry and a

new awareness of the rich cultural heritage that was theirs. Yet the book


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STEPHEN HAWKING

does not only speak to black Americans. As Haley wrote, ‘In all of us

there is a hunger, marrow deep, to know our heritage – to know who we

are and where we came from.’ For all of us, without this, ‘there is a

hollow yearning. No matter what our attainments in life, there is still a

vacuum, an emptiness, and the most disquieting loneliness.’ For this

reason, Roots speaks to people of all races and from all nations. And, in

its story of a young man transported across an ocean and his

descendants’ struggle against the brutal realities of slavery, it provides

eloquent testimony to the ability of the human spirit to survive in the

worst of circumstances.

�Read onQueen (Haley traces the other side of his family back to the illegitimate

daughter of a white plantation owner in a book left unfinished at his

death and completed by his friend David Stevens)

Melton McLaurin, Celia, a Slave: A True Story; Hugh Thomas, The SlaveTrade

STEPHEN HAWKING (b. 1942) UK

A BRIEF HISTORY OF TIME (1988)Stephen Hawking is probably the most famous scientist in the world

today. Like Einstein before him, he has become a representative figure

in the public mind of the kind of people who undertake the most

vaulting speculations about the universe. That he has become so is


52


probably a consequence of two things. One is the runaway success of

his book A Brief History of Time which has sold millions of copies

worldwide since its first publication. The second is the fact that Hawking

suffers from the terrible long-term effects of motor neurone disease.

That the mind which makes such enormous leaps and bounds of the

imagination is trapped within a wasted and wheelchair-confined body

has an ironic poignancy that fixes Hawking in the public imagination.

Since 1979 he has been Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at

Cambridge (a position once held by Sir Isaac Newton) and he has long

been at the forefront of attempts to combine the two great

achievements of modern physics – quantum theory and relativity – into

one grand theory. However, it has been A Brief History of Time which

has brought him the greatest fame and public recognition. Ever since it

was first published, jokes have been made about its formidable density

and the inability of most people who began it to finish it but the jokes

are unfair. A Brief History of Time is actually a very elegantly written

and lucid survey of man’s attempts to understand the universe from the

time of the Ancient Greeks to the present day. For non-scientists it

represents an opportunity to introduce themselves to the kind of

advanced answers that scientists are giving to the profoundest

questions about the origin, nature and eventual destiny of the universe.

We too can learn about the exhilarating search, in Hawking’s metaphor,

‘to know the mind of God’.

�Read onBlack Holes and Baby Universes Brian Greene, The Elegant Universe; Michio Kaku, Hyperspace


53

JOSEPH HELLER

JOSEPH HELLER (1923–99) USA

CATCH-22 (1961)The madness of war has never been better captured than in the pages of

Heller’s novel about US bomber pilots stationed on a Mediterranean

island during the Second World War. Damned if they fly their missions

and damned if they don’t, the men are caught in the vicious circle that is

Catch-22. If you’re crazy, you won’t have to fly. All you need to do is ask.

If, however, you ask to be grounded because what you’re doing is crazy,

that proves you’re sane and you have to fly. As Yossarian, the anti-hero

of Heller’s black comedy, remarks, ‘That’s some catch, that catch-22’.

Around the central figure of Yossarian, a man who measures his sanity

against the insanity of the system, swirls a large cast of memor able

characters. There is Milo Minderbinder, the lunatic entrepreneur who

takes the freedom of the market to such wild extremes that he ends by

signing contracts for bombing missions with the Germans and arranging

for the dropping of explosives on his own base. There is Major Major

Major, a man condemned to ridicule by the convergence of his name and

his army rank. There is a battalion of gung-ho top brass who never spare

a moment’s thought for the poor saps who actually fly the missions.

Heller went on to write other novels such as Something Happened and

Good as Gold but none had quite the enormous success that Catch-22had. Perhaps that success was a consequence of Heller’s first-hand

knowledge of the world of which he wrote in his finest novel. As a young

man he had served as a bombardier in the US Air Force and had flown

from bases in Italy on dozens of missions. In Catch-22, he looks at the

horrors of war and violence and invites us to laugh in the dark.


54


�Read on

Good as Gold; Closing TimeJaroslav Hasek, The Good Soldier Svejk; Norman Mailer, The Nakedand the Dead

EUGEN HERRIGEL (1884–1955) GERMANY

ZEN IN THE ART OF ARCHERY (1948/1953)Eugen Herrigel, a German academic, lived in Japan in the 1920s and,

whilst he was there, he studied kyudo or Japanese archery. On his

return to Europe, he wrote a short essay on his experiences and he

expanded this into a book, first published in German soon after the

Second World War. An English version of the book appeared two years

before Herrigel’s death, with a foreword by the famous Japanese

exponent of Zen, D.T. Suzuki. Over the decades since the publication of

Zen in the Art of Archery it has sometimes been suggested that

Herrigel misunderstood both the nature of Zen and the practice of

kyudo but his book has long become established as a classic account

of a Westerner encountering the very different mindset of Eastern

thinkers. In his study of kyudo the German professor needs to learn that

technical expertise and technical knowledge are not enough. What is

needed is the ability to go beyond these and reach a stage where the

body completes complex and difficult actions without the conscious

intervention of the mind. The body achieves control; the conscious self

disappears. It is a state of being with which most great sportsmen are


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HERMANN HESSE

probably familiar in some form and it will not be reached if the archer

refuses to surrender to it. As Herrigel’s teacher tells him, ‘The right shot,

at the right moment, does not come because you do not let go of

yourself.’ Through years of training with his teacher, Herrigel not only

moves slowly towards skill as an archer but he also nudges his way

towards new ways of seeing the world and our interaction with it.

‘Fundamentally the marksman aims at himself,’ is another of the

aphorisms his teacher passes on to him and Zen and the Art of Archeryrecords the transformation of that self.

�Read onThe Method of ZenGustie Herrigel, Zen in the Art of Flower Arrangement; D.T. Suzuki, TheZen Doctrine of No-Mind; Shunryu Suzuki, Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind

HERMANN HESSE (1877–1962) GERMANY

SIDDHARTHA (1922/1951)Poet, novelist, mystic and winner of the 1946 Nobel Prize for Literature,

Hermann Hesse was influenced both by Carl Gustav Jung and, later, by

Buddhist philosophy. Hesse’s knowledge of Jungian ideas is reflected in

many of his novels, including Demian and Steppenwolf. The impor -

tance of Buddhism to his views on life can be seen most clearly in

Siddhartha, a novel which follows the spiritual journey of its

eponymous character, an Indian man living in the sixth century BC, at


56


the same time as the Buddha. At the heart of the novel’s story are the

varying, often conflicting demands of the contemplative life and the

active life. Siddhartha, born into a Brahmin family, is drawn to the

extreme asceticism of the wandering holy men known as Samanas who

visit his village. Against his father’s wishes, he joins the Samanas and

seeks enlightenment through the renunciation of the world. Self-denial

does not prove the correct path for Siddhartha and nor does his later

indulgence in the pleasures of the world. Even encounters with Gotama,

the Buddha, provide confusion and fresh questions rather than the

answers to life’s mysteries which Siddhartha seeks. It is only when he

decides to live and work alongside the ferryman Vasudeva, listening to

the sounds of the river and contemplating the cycle without beginning

and end that connects all life, that Siddhartha finally begins to achieve

the enlightenment he has so long and so fruitlessly sought. Eventually

Siddhartha comes to believe that, ‘Wisdom is not communicable.’ As he

goes on to say, ‘Knowledge can be communicated, but not wisdom. One

can find it, live it, be fortified by it, do wonders through it, but one

cannot communicate and teach it.’ One of the ironies of Hesse’s novel

is that many of its admirers would argue that it does just that.


�Read onSteppenwolfThomas Mann, The Holy Sinner


57

S.E. HINTON

S.E. HINTON (b. 1948) USA

THE OUTSIDERS (1967)Only a handful of novels for teenagers are actually written by teenagers.

Most are the work of older writers who are likely to have forgotten what

the experience of being a teenager is like. S.E. Hinton’s The Outsiders,

however, was begun when the author was 15 and finally published when

she was 18. Hinton knew the world of which she wrote from the inside.

Her book is narrated by Ponyboy Curtis, a sensitive and intelligent

fourteen-year-old boy whose parents have recently died in a car crash.

He lives with his two older brothers in the impoverished East Side area

of a large, unnamed American town. In Ponyboy’s world there are two

entirely different tribes of people. There are ‘greasers’ and there are

‘socs’. Socs have the money and the social position. Greasers come from

the wrong side of the tracks. Ponyboy and his brothers are greasers and

are therefore sworn enemies of socs. The novel follows the bitter rivalry

between the two gangs, which spirals increasingly into violence, and

Ponyboy’s relationship with two doomed friends, Dallas and Johnny. It is

Johnny who, on his deathbed, urges Ponyboy to ‘stay gold’, a poignant

reference to a Robert Frost poem which Ponyboy has quoted earlier in

the novel. Ponyboy eventually vows to forsake the fighting and the tribal

warfare between greasers and socs for Johnny’s sake and he begins to

write the story that, we assume, will become the novel we have just read.

The Outsiders is often overwrought, melo dramatic and sentimental but

it has a power to move readers that transcends its faults. They care about

Ponyboy and his struggles to understand his traumatic experiences of

love and death. Hinton has written more sophisticated novels in her later


58


career but she has never written one that has been as successful or

touched as many people so directly.

�Read onThat Was Then, This Is Now; Rumble FishMelvyn Burgess, Junk

DOUGLAS HOFSTADTER (b. 1945) US

GÖDEL, ESCHER, BACH (1979)The son of a Nobel Prize-winning physicist, Douglas Hofstadter began

his career as a mathematician and physicist himself but he is most

famous for Gödel, Escher, Bach which has become a classic investi -

gation, unorthodox and digressive, into the workings of the human

mind. He takes as his starting points the music of J.S. Bach, the artwork

of M.C. Escher and the mathematical theories of Kurt Gödel and he

weaves them all into an eye-opening and thought-provoking exami -

nation of the power of human creativity and thought and the nature of

identity. Playful and paradoxical, the work is full of puns and puzzles,

games and stories. Chapters which further the argument alternate with

dialogues between imaginary characters that refer back to one another

and to the main text. The book remains indefinable and difficult to pin

down. When given the opportunity to describe how he would define it,

Hofstadter said that it was ‘a very personal attempt to say how it is that

animate beings can come out of inanimate matter. What is a self, and

how can a self come out of stuff that is as selfless as a stone or a


59

ALDOUS HUXLEY

puddle?’ In the years since Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hofstadter has pub -

lished a number of other books. He collaborated with the philosopher

and neuroscientist Daniel Dennett to bring together a mind-stretching

collection of essays and fictions on identity and conscious ness entitled

The Mind’s I, which included contributions by people ranging from Alan

Turing to Jorge Luis Borges. I Am a Strange Loop, published in 2007,

revisited some of the territory of his first book. However, thirty years on,

Gödel, Escher, Bach remains unique – a wonderful, if demanding, read.

Breathtaking in its ambition and its ability to cross boundaries and to

jump exhilaratingly from one intellectual discipline to another, it

continues to provide an epic adventure for the mind.

�Read onThe Mind’s I; I Am a Strange LoopDaniel Dennett, Consciousness Explained; Gerald Edelman, Widerthan the Sky

ALDOUS HUXLEY (1894–1963) UK

THE DOORS OF PERCEPTION (1954)Best remembered today for Brave New World, his dystopian vision of a

biologically engineered future, Huxley was a polymath from a

distinguished intellectual family. In the 1920s and 1930s, he became

famous for glittering and mordantly satirical novels about rich and

clever people struggling to find meaning in their essentially trivial lives.

He moved to the USA in 1937 where he worked as a Hollywood script -


60

writer. He lived in America for the rest of his life, continuing to publish

a wide range of both fiction and non-fiction. The Doors of Perception is

an account of his experiments in the 1950s with mind-altering drugs,

particularly mescaline. Huxley took his title from the English poet and

mystic William Blake. In one of his prophetic books of the 1790s, Blake

wrote, ‘If the doors of perception were cleansed everything would

appear to man as it is, infinite.’ Huxley clearly believed that mescaline

‘cleansed’ his mind. Throughout his descriptions of his experiments, he

emphasises that what he was experiencing was not a vision but a

heightened version of reality. When he looks again at a vase of flowers

he had admired before taking the drug, he sees so much more than he

had earlier. ‘I was not looking now at an unusual flower arrangement,’

Huxley writes. ‘I was seeing what Adam had seen on the morning of his

creation – the miracle, moment by moment, of naked existence.’ When

someone asks him whether the experience is agreeable, he replies,

‘Neither agreeable nor disagreeable. It just is.’ The Doors of Perceptionis a remarkable book. It is an honest and memorable record of what one

exceptionally intelligent and sensitive man experienced under the

influence of mind-expanding drugs. Reading it can still expand the

minds of those who approach the book with the same willingness to ‘be

shaken out of the ruts of ordinary perception’ that inspired its author.


�Read onMoksha; The Perennial PhilosophyAlbert Hoffman, LSD: My Problem Child; Daniel Pinchbeck, BreakingOpen the Head



61

WILLIAM JAMES

READONATHEME: ALTERED CONSCIOUSNESS

Stanislav Grof, Beyond the BrainTimothy Leary, The Politics of EcstasyJohn C. Lilly, The Scientist: A Metaphysical AutobiographyTerence McKenna, The Invisible LandscapeJeremy Narby, The Cosmic SerpentRick Strassman, DMT: The Spirit MoleculeCharles Tart, Altered States of Consciousness

WILLIAM JAMES (1842–1910) USA

THE VARIETIES OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE (1902)The son of the leading exponent of Swedenborgian ideas in America

and the elder brother of the novelist Henry James, William James

entered Harvard to study medicine in 1861. He was to spend nearly all

the rest of his life attached to the university in some capacity, latterly as

professor of philosophy and psychology. In the 1890s, James’s interest

focused more and more on metaphysical questions of the existence of

God, life after death and religious belief. Characteristically, for a philos -

opher who was a leading exponent of a brand of pragmatism which

claimed that abstract ideas are only of value if experience proves that

they work in the material world, James approached these questions


62


with the aim of investigating them empirically. He collaborated with

psychical researchers to look into the possibility of survival after death

and he examined the nature of religious belief by looking at the records

of religious experience. The culmination of this work was his most

famous book, The Varieties of Religious Experience, which had its

origin in a series of lectures he gave on the other side of the Atlantic to

Harvard, at the University of Edinburgh. James’s focus in the book is on

the individual’s experience of religion rather than the rituals and beliefs

of any particular faith or church. After analysis of personal accounts, he

concludes that the validity of religious belief resides in the emotional

fulfilment that it offers the individual believer rather than in its objective

‘truth’. The particulars of faith are ‘true’ insofar as they supply the

emotional needs. More than a century after its first publication, James’s

magnum opus retains its validity and its ability to throw light on why

and how human beings express their sense of the numinous and the

spiritual.

�Read onThe Will to BelieveMircea Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane; Rudolf Otto, The Idea ofthe Holy


63

C.G. JUNG

C.G. JUNG (1875–1961) SWITZERLAND

MEMORIES, DREAMS, REFLECTIONS (1962)The son of a Lutheran pastor, Jung was born in Switzerland and studied

medicine at the University of Basel. Choosing to specialise in psychiatry,

he went on to work at the Burghölzli mental hospital in Zurich and it was

while he was there that he first became aware of the ideas of Freud,

then little known outside Vienna. Jung was enthralled by them and, for

a number of years, he was Freud’s most ardent and, after the two men

had met, most favoured disciple. Jung, however, was not the kind of

man likely to remain a disciple for life and he and Freud came to a

parting of the ways in 1912. The split was traumatic for both men but

especially for Jung who came close to complete breakdown. He

emerged from his long dark night of the soul with the path clear before

him to move towards the wide-ranging ideas of his own mature theories

of human personality, usually known as ‘analytic psychology’. The rest

of his long life was spent in working out the meanings and implications

of these ideas. It is to Jung that we owe the concepts of ‘extrovert’ and

‘introvert’ personalities, of psychological archetypes and of the

collective unconscious. He affected the way in which we think about the

human mind more profoundly than anyone in the twentieth century

other than his original mentor, Freud. Probably the best introduction to

Jung for a general reader is Memories, Dreams, Reflections. Not so

much his autobiography as a record of his developing beliefs about

himself and the world, the book (first published in the year after his

death) describes the spiritual and psychological journey of one

remarkable and influential man. According to Jung, ‘the sole purpose of


64


human existence is to kindle a light in the darkness of mere being’ and

his book does just that.

�Read onMan and His Symbols; The Undiscovered SelfJames Hillman, The Soul’s Code

HELEN KELLER (1880–1968) USA

THE STORY OF MY LIFE (1902)There are few more inspirational lives than that of Helen Keller, the deaf

and blind American woman who overcame her disabilities to become an

internationally respected writer and political activist. Told in her own

words, the story of her life and her rescue from isolation by an endlessly

patient teacher provides unforgettable evidence that people can triumph

against all the odds. Born in Alabama, Helen Keller was struck down by

a mysterious illness, possibly scarlet fever or meningitis, at the age of

nineteen months which left her deaf, blind and (because she had not

learned to speak) mute. Her devastated parents sought some means of

drawing their child out of the prison into which her illness had cast her

and, with the assistance of Alexander Graham Bell, inventor of the

telephone and a pioneer of education for the deaf, they found a young,

20-year-old teacher named Anne Sullivan who agreed to undertake the

apparently impossible task of communicating with Helen. The results of

the relationship between Anne Sullivan and her charge (a relationship


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READ ON A THEME: INSPIRING MEMOIRS

which eventually lasted nearly 50 years) are well known. With

astonishing patience on one side and remarkable determination on the

other, a teaching programme began which led to Helen Keller becoming

the first deafblind person to graduate from college, a bestselling author,

a political and social activist and a figure of worldwide fame. The early

years of this extraordinary collaboration are recorded in The Story of MyLife. In a later book Helen Keller wrote, ‘If I am happy in spite of my

deprivations, if my happiness is so deep that it is a faith, so thoughtful

that it becomes a philosophy of life – if, in short, I am an optimist, my

testimony to the creed of optimism is worth hearing.’ The testimony she

provided in The Story of My Life certainly continues to be worth reading.

�Read onThe World I Live InGeorgina Kleege, Blind Rage: Letters to Helen Keller; Oliver Sacks,

Seeing Voices

READONATHEME: INSPIRING MEMOIRS

Karen Armstrong, The Spiral StaircaseAndrea Ashworth, Once in a House on FireJean-Dominique Bauby, The Diving-Bell and the ButterflyBrian Keenan, An Evil CradlingFrank McCourt, Angela’s AshesDave Pelzer, A Child Called ItAlice Sebold, Lucky


66


JACK KEROUAC (1922–69) USA

ON THE ROAD (1957)Jack Kerouac was born in Massachusetts into a French-speaking family

from Canada. He won a football scholarship to attend Columbia

University but Kerouac, sports jock though he was, was always

interested in writing and, after dropping out of Columbia, he continued

to live in New York where he was able to mix with others who shared his

tastes in literature. These friends from the 1940s – people like Allen

Ginsberg and William S. Burroughs – became the central figures in the

so-called Beat Generation of the next decade and Kerouac, after the

publication of On the Road, became its king. In his classic account of

the Beats’ battle against ordinariness, narrator Sal Paradise and his

buddy Dean Moriarty (based on Kerouac’s charismatic friend Neal

Cassady) hit the road and zigzag across the wide open spaces of

America in search of love, sex and enlightenment. For Sal, as for his

creator, the people who have the most to offer on the road are the ones

who refuse to be blinkered by dull conventions and instead are

determined to live life to the full. These are the people who are, in Sal’s

words, ‘the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad

to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones that

never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like

fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the

stars...’ Not everyone found Kerouac’s vision of an alternative America

compelling and not everyone admired his talents as an author (‘This

isn’t writing, it’s typing,’ Truman Capote once famously said) but his

status as cultural icon is undeniable. Nearly fifty years after its first


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KEN KESEY

publication, On the Road remains an essential text for rebels both with

and without a cause.

�Read onThe Dharma Bums; Visions of CodyWilliam S. Burroughs, Junky; John Clellon Holmes, Go; Hunter S.

Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas

KEN KESEY (1935–2001) USA

ONE FLEW OVER THE CUCKOO’S NEST (1962)In 1959, Ken Kesey, then a creative writing student at Stanford

University, volunteered to act as a guinea pig in a series of medical

trials, partly sponsored by the CIA, into the effects of psychoactive

drugs like LSD and mescaline. The experiences he had during these

trials fed into the novel he was writing and the result was One FlewOver the Cuckoo’s Nest. Set in a mental hospital in Oregon, the book is

narrated by ‘Chief’ Bromden, a giant American Indian patient there. It

tells the story of what happens to the other inmates of the hospital

when the drugged routine of their lives is disrupted by the arrival of

Randle McMurphy, a larger-than-life prankster who challenges all the

rules and assumptions of the establishment. McMurphy is eventually

defeated by the powers he sets out to confront but not before he has

inspired his fellow patients and given ‘Chief’ Bromden the incentive to

rediscover his true self and escape the hospital. Apart from his fiction –


68


other novels include Sometimes a Great Notion and Sailor Song –

Kesey is also known as the leader of the ‘Merry Pranksters’, the group

of proto-hippies who, in the summer of 1964, drove across America in a

psychedelically painted school bus, startling the natives of the small

towns en route with their appearance and their antics. Throughout his

life – and in all his writings – Kesey’s aim was to startle. Just as Randle

McMurphy strove to awaken his fellow inmates to the world outside the

hospital, his creator wanted to stimulate people into new ways of

looking at life and its potential. The Merry Pranksters are no more, and

their frolics survive only in the pages of The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test,Tom Wolfe’s eye-opening and very funny account of travelling with

them, but One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest remains as a testament to

Kesey’s provocative power.

�Read onSometimes a Great NotionGene Brewer, K-Pax; Tom Wolfe, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test

MARTIN LUTHER KING (1929–68) USA

A TESTAMENT OF HOPE (1986)The most eloquent black leader of the civil rights movement of the

1950s and 1960s was born in Atlanta, Georgia, the son of a Baptist

preacher. He went on to become a pastor himself in Montgomery,

Alabama and was on hand to accept leadership in one of the first great


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MARTIN LUTHER KING

campaigns for black equality in the USA, the celebrated Montgomery

Bus Boycott that began when Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat to

a white man. For the rest of his life, King was at the heart of the civil

rights movement, delivering hundreds of speeches and playing a major

role in demonstrations such as the famous 1963 March on Washington

for Jobs and Freedom. In 1964, as the movement’s most prominent

advocate of non-violent agitation for change, he became the youngest

person ever to be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. Four years later, on 4

April 1968, King was assassinated as he stood on the balcony of a motel

room in Memphis. Four decades after his death, his stature as a black

leader remains undiminished. Subtitled ‘The Essential Writings and

Speeches of Martin Luther King Jr’, A Testament of Hope includes all the

most inspiring words that King gave to the world, from his famous ‘I

Have a Dream’ speech to the ‘Letter from Birmingham Jail’, written in

defence of the idea of civil disobedience after he had been arrested for

taking part in a non-violent protest against racial segregation. Martin

Luther King was a man who believed, in his own words from the ‘Letter

from Birmingham Jail’, that, ‘Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice

everywhere.’ In his own life, so tragically cut short, he campaigned

against injustice wherever he found it and the words he wrote and

spoke can still move people to take up the battle he fought.

�Read onDietrich Bonhoeffer, Letter and Papers from Prison; David Garrow,

Bearing the Cross; Rosa Parks, My Story


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BARBARA KINGSOLVER (b. 1955) USA

THE POISONWOOD BIBLE (1999)Barbara Kingsolver was born and brought up in rural America, the

setting for a number of her novels, and studied biology at graduate and

postgraduate level. She began to publish her stories in the mid-1980s

and has since published close to a dozen volumes of both fiction and

non-fiction. Like the great nineteenth-century novelists, Kingsolver

clearly believes that fiction has a duty to engage with the real world. She

has even sponsored a prize, the Bellwether Prize, which is awarded to

a first novel that combines both literary quality and a commitment to

literature as a tool for social change. Her own novels are, in the best

sense of the word, old-fashioned in that they grapple with political,

social and moral issues. In narratives that grip the imaginations of

readers, she faces up to concerns about colonialism, the rift between

the developed and the undeveloped world, and man’s impact on the

environment. The Poisonwood Bible is her most ambitious novel to

date. At its heart is Nathan Price, a narrow-minded Christian evangelist

who arrives with his family in the Belgian Congo to serve as a

missionary to African people to whom his message means little. The

year is 1959 and great changes are on hand but the messianic Price is

as blind to these as he is to the real needs of his family and those of the

people whose souls he is endeavouring to ‘save’. The narrative moves

inexorably towards personal tragedy set amid the wider tragedy of a

new nation still suffering from the hangover of imperialism. Cleverly and

imaginatively told in the very different voices of Price’s wife and his four

daughters, The Poisonwood Bible is a novel that renews confidence in


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NAOMI KLEIN

the ability of fiction to confront the major themes of modern life and to

illuminate them.

�Read onThe Bean Trees; Pigs in HeavenChinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart; Jane Smiley, A Thousand Acres

NAOMI KLEIN (b. 1970) CANADA

NO LOGO (2000)If the anti-globalization movement can be said to have a manifesto,

then it is probably Naomi Klein’s No Logo. Her fiery but carefully argued

assault on the power of brands opens readers’ eyes to the often

pernicious ways in which modern capitalism works. From sweatshops in

Asia to fast food outlets in America, she examines all the places where

people are exploited for profit and shows how we can fight against the

exploitation. Naomi Klein was born in Canada, the daughter of a physician

and a film-maker who had felt obliged to leave their native America

because of their involvement in the anti-Vietnam War movement. She

worked as a journalist after university and published No Logo when she

was still in her twenties. Its success propelled her to worldwide fame as

a campaigning intellectual and she has recently published another

controversial bestseller, The Shock Doctrine, which argues that free

market capitalism thrives on and even encourages human disasters.

One of the great strengths of Klein’s first book is that she recognises the


72


paradoxical ability of giant organisations to appeal to very human

desires and she does not underestimate this ability. ‘We are looking to

brands for poetry and for spirituality,’ she writes, ‘because we’re not

getting those things from our communities or from each other.’ She

understands the power of brands to embody dreams of what life might

be and, because of this understanding, she does not dismiss the hold

they have on people’s lives. Instead, she argues the case for better

dreams than those the giant corporations wish to foist upon us. NoLogo provides both a guide to understanding the process through

which brands have come to rule our lives and a handbook to the

growing resistance movement which is fighting to curb their power.

�Read onThe Shock DoctrineOliver James, Affluenza; George Monbiot, Captive State

J. KRISHNAMURTI (1895–1986) INDIA

FREEDOM FROM THE KNOWN (1969)As a boy, Krishnamurti, the son of an Indian Brahmin, was hailed by

leading members of the Theosophical Society as the ‘vehicle’ of a

coming World Teacher and was trained by Annie Besant and other

theosophists for the role they thought he was destined to play. When he

reached young manhood, the World Teacher-in-waiting disavowed the

notion that he was someone special but he continued to travel the


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J. KRISHNAMURTI

world and speak about the life of the mind and the spirit for the rest of

his long life. For a man so often acclaimed as a guru himself,

Krishnamurti was remarkably dismissive of the very notion that gurus of

any kind are of much value. In Freedom from the Known, a book of his

profoundest thoughts about life, recorded by one of his admirers

named Mary Lutyens, he said that, ‘you cannot depend on anybody.

There is no guide, no teacher, no authority.’ To Krishnamurti in his later

years, ‘The question of whether or not there is a God or truth or reality

or whatever you like to call it, can never be answered … by priests,

philosophers or saviours.’ Only the individual could ultimately answer

the question and he or she could only answer it through self-

knowledge. ‘Immaturity,’ Krishnamurti said, ‘lies only in total ignorance

of self.’ There are many obstacles in the path to self-knowledge. Identi -

fying the self with external forces, whether they be religions, political

systems or national institutions, will only postpone the moment when

self-knowledge and maturity arrive. If people are able to attain that

elusive self-knowledge, then they will be surprised to find that the

answers to the most tormenting questions are not only to be found

within us but that they are simpler than we tend to think. In the final

analysis, Krishnamurti’s ideas of what it is to be fully human are

remarkably accessible.

�Read onCommentaries on Living (in three volumes); The First and LastFreedomDavid Bohm, The Limits of Thought (discussions between Bohm and

Krishnamurti); Sri Ramana Maharshi, Be As You Are


74


MILAN KUNDERA (b. 1929) CZECH REPUBLIC

THE UNBEARABLE LIGHTNESS OF BEING (1984)Milan Kundera is a Czech novelist whose work fell foul of the old

Communist authorities in his native country because of its irony and its

unacceptable commitment to ideas of personal and political freedom.

His first novel, The Joke, immediately established his distinctive voice

with its story of a young student whose life is overturned when he

makes the mistake of joking about matters that the state and the party

consider to be serious. Kundera’s most characteristic work of fiction,

published after he was encouraged to leave Czechoslovakia and

stripped of his Czech nationality, is The Unbearable Lightness ofBeing. The book is set in Prague at the time of the brief flowering of

freedom in spring 1968. At its heart is the love affair and marriage

between Tomas, a charming but incorrigible womanizer, and Tereza, a

woman he meets when she is tending bar in a small town hotel. Tomas,

a surgeon, is forced into exile and a menial job by the events of 1968

but continues his obsessive Don Juanism and his relationship with his

mistress Sabina, herself entangled in another unhappy affair. TheUnbearable Lightness of Being is at once an ironic story of the diffi -

culties of sexual and romantic love and a novel of ideas, peppered with

aphorisms, short digressions and meditations on the nature of human

choice and the effects of mere chance and contingency on our plans

and decisions. In an interview, published in The Paris Review not long

before the publication of his best-known work, Kundera said, ‘You can

understand nothing about art, particularly modern art, if you do not

understand that imagination is a value in itself.’ In his fiction he


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DALAI LAMA

champions the freedom of the imagination with a daring that few other

European novelists have matched.

�Read onThe Joke; The Book of Laughter and ForgettingBohumil Hrabal, Closely Observed Trains; Ivan Klima, Love andGarbage

DALAI LAMA (b. 1935) TIBET

THE ART OF HAPPINESS (1998)To Tibetan Buddhists Tenzin Gyatso is the fourteenth Dalai Lama, the

latest in a line of tulkus or spiritual masters that stretches back

centuries. He was recognised as the reincarnation of the previous Dalai

Lama when he was only a small boy and is the temporal as well as the

spiritual leader of the Tibetan people. However, since 1959 he has lived

in exile in India and his country has been ruled by the People’s Republic

of China. To other people around the world, including many who do not

share his religious views, the Dalai Lama is a man of particular spiritual

power and insight. Based on a series of interviews with the psychiatrist

Howard Cutler, The Art of Happiness is a guide to the kind of everyday

problems and troubling questions that face us all. Why are people

unhappy? What is romantic love and why is it so often not enough to

heal our wounds? How should we respond to evil and to death? The

Dalai Lama is not blind to the suffering in the world. How could the


76


leader of a nation that has had a recent history like Tibet’s be anything

other than acutely aware of, say, the pain that the powerful can inflict

upon the powerless? However, he believes that happiness is truly in

everybody’s grasp. In his speech accepting the 1989 Nobel Peace Prize,

he said, ‘I believe all suffering is caused by ignorance. People inflict

pain on others in the selfish pursuit of their happiness or satisfaction.

Yet true happiness comes from a sense of inner peace and

contentment, which in turn must be achieved through the cultivation of

altruism, of love and compassion and elimination of ignorance,

selfishness and greed.’ Focusing on the practical application of spiritual

values to the difficulties of ordinary life, The Art of Happiness draws on

the wisdom of one remarkable man to provide a means of attaining that

true happiness.

�Read onFreedom in ExileThich Nhat Hanh, The Miracle of Mindfulness; Chogyam Trungpa,

Cutting through Spiritual Materialism


77

HARPER LEE

HARPER LEE (b. 1926) USA

TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD (1960)‘The one thing that doesn’t abide by majority rule is a person’s

conscience,’ says Atticus Finch, the small-town lawyer at the heart of

Harper Lee’s only novel, and the story demonstrates his determination

to live by what he preaches. Seen through the eyes of his daughter, the

narrator Scout, Atticus battles against the prejudice and racism that

lurks beneath the surface of the town in the Deep South where he

practises. He takes on the defence of Tom Robinson, a black man

accused of raping a white girl. In the trial, Atticus proves conclusively

that the accusation is a false one, based on lies and perjured testimony

to the court. Nevertheless, Tom is convicted and is later shot while

supposedly attempting to escape from prison. Meanwhile, Scout and

her brother Jem learn to develop tolerance and belief in their own

convictions as they get to know the truth about Boo Radley, an odd and

gentle recluse who has been demonised by most of the townsfolk.

Harper Lee was born in the Alabama town of Monroeville and studied

law at the University of Alabama. She began to write when she was

working in the travel industry in New York and To Kill a Mockingbird,

begun in the late 1950s, was finally published in the summer of 1960.

Its success, both critical and commercial, was instant. It became a

bestseller and won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. Perhaps its success has

been too overwhelming for its author because she has published

nothing else other than a handful of essays. However, in the forty years

and more since its first publication, her novel has become accepted as

a classic portrait of a humane man determined to follow his own


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principles and of a child learning to recognise the injustices of the adult

world.

�Read onTruman Capote, Other Voices, Other Rooms (Harper Lee knew Capote

when they were both children in Monroeville and the character of Dill in

her novel is usually said to be based on him); William Faulkner, Intruderin the Dust; Eudora Welty, The Optimist’s Daughter

DORIS LESSING (b. 1919) RHODESIA/UK

THE GOLDEN NOTEBOOK (1962)Doris Lessing was born in Iran, brought up in Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe)

and moved to London in 1949 because her involvement in progressive

and anti-racist politics made it difficult for her to stay in southern Africa.

Her first novel was published the following year and much of her earlier

fiction drew upon her experiences in Africa. She is known for two

massive and very different sequences of novels. The semi-

autobiographical ‘Children of Violence’ series follows the fortunes of

Martha Quest from her childhood in southern Africa to old age in an

apocalyptic future; the ‘Canopus in Argos’ books use the themes and

motifs of science fiction to explore a series of possible histories.

However, the novel by Doris Lessing which has probably meant most to

most readers over the years is The Golden Notebook, the story of writer

Anna Wulf. The book is set in the 1950s at the height of the Cold War and


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DORIS LESSING

the Communist Anna is struggling to balance political and personal

commitments and to make sense of her experiences of work, sex, love

and single parenthood. Anna writes about the different elements of her

life in different coloured notebooks. The black notebook records the

memories of her past, the red one expresses her political ideas and her

interaction with the British Communist Party, the yellow one is for

detailing the painful aftermath of an affair, and the blue one for writing

down her dreams. It is only in the golden notebook of the title that she

can integrate all her different selves into a whole. In one of her

notebooks, Anna writes that, ‘There is only one real sin, and that is to

persuade oneself that the second-best is anything but the second-

best’. As a novelist, Lessing has never contented herself with the

second-best and The Golden Notebook is her most challenging,

provoking and inspiring book.

�Read onMartha Quest (and the other books in the ‘Children of Violence’

sequence); Memoirs of a SurvivorIris Murdoch, A Severed Head; Christina Stead, Letty Fox: Her Luck


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PRIMO LEVI (1919–87) ITALY

IF THIS IS A MAN (1947/1958)Primo Levi was a Jewish-Italian survivor of Auschwitz. Born in Turin, the

city he was to call home for most of his life, Levi studied chemistry at the

university there and graduated in 1941. Anti-semitic legislation made it

difficult for him to find work but much worse persecution was to follow

as the war continued, Mussolini was deposed and Italy became a

battleground between Fascist and anti-Fascist forces. Levi joined the

Partisans in the hills of northern Italy but was captured by Fascist militia

and, as a Jew, was sent to Auschwitz in February 1944. He spent eleven

months in the camp, surviving through luck and the small advantages

his scientific knowledge conferred on him, before it was liberated by the

Red Army. In If This is a Man he describes, in clear and careful prose,

the terrible events to which he was witness. At times Levi,

unsurprisingly, reached the darkest depths of despair and was prepared

to give up any hope of survival. The message that another inmate, with

his stoic determination to maintain self-respect, gave him was central

to his willingness to keep going. This message was that, ‘... precisely

because the Lager was a great machine to reduce us to beasts, we must

not become beasts; that even in this place one can survive, and

therefore one must want to survive, to tell the story, to bear witness;

and that to survive we must force ourselves to save at least the

skeleton, the scaffolding, the form of civilization.’ Primo Levi did

eventually survive to bear witness and he wrote If This is a Man soon

after the war. The book was eventually published in English in 1958. As

a humane testimony to monstrous inhumanity, it has its place among

the most important and challenging books of the twentieth century.


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C.S. LEWIS

�Read onThe Drowned and the Saved; The Periodic Table (Levi uses the elements

of the periodic table as a means of organising a series of auto -

biographical essays)

Piera Sonnino, This Has Happened: An Italian Family in Auschwitz;

Wladsyslaw Szpilman, The Pianist

C.S. LEWIS (1898–1963) UK

SURPRISED BY JOY (1955)C.S. Lewis spent his career as an academic in Oxford and Cambridge but

he is most famous as a writer for children and as one of the twentieth

century’s most gifted apologists for the Christian faith. His books about

the hidden kingdom of Narnia, first published in the 1950s, rapidly

became classics of children’s literature. His volumes on Christianity

include such titles as Mere Christianity, The Problem of Pain and TheScrewtape Letters, a clever and mischievous satire in the form of a

series of letters of advice supposedly sent by a demon named

Screwtape to his nephew Wormwood who is embarking on the tempt -

ation of an ordinary man. A Grief Observed, originally published under

a pseudonym, is a series of moving reflections on grief occasioned by

the death of his wife. Surprised by Joy is usually described as an

autobiography and it does reveal much about Lewis’s early life but it is

primarily an account of his conversion to Christianity. He does not des -

cribe embracing his faith with the fervour usually expected of new

devotees. ‘In the Trinity Term of 1929 I gave in,’ he reports, ‘and admitted


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that God was God, and knelt and prayed: perhaps, that night, the most

dejected and reluctant convert in all England.’ Yet the reluc tant convert

had finally found the means of making sense of the ‘inconsolable

longing’ for something elusive which had always haunted him, ‘an

unsatisfied desire which is itself more desirable than any other

satisfaction’, to which Lewis attached the untranslatable German word

‘Sehnsucht’. For Lewis the something elusive was God and the discovery

of faith was the means by which he was ‘surprised by joy’. In the book to

which he gave that title, he provides one of the most revealing and

readable accounts in the twentieth century of a spiritual quest.

�Read onA Grief Observed; The Screwtape LettersG.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy; Thomas Merton, The Seven Storey Mountain

JAMES LOVELOCK (b. 1919) UK

GAIA (1979)James Lovelock’s long career as a scientist began nearly 70 years ago

(he graduated from Manchester University with a degree in chemistry in

1941) and his achievements in a variety of scientific disciplines have

been many. His invention of the electron capture detector in the 1950s

has proved of lasting benefit in detecting the persistence of certain

man-made chemicals in the atmosphere. Others of his inventions have

been used in NASA planetary exploration programmes. However, he is


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JAMES LOVELOCK

best known as the proponent of the ‘Gaia’ hypothesis, first formulated

in the 1960s but brought before a wide audience with the publication in

1979 of his book Gaia. (Naming the hypothesis after the Greek goddess

of the earth was the suggestion of the novelist William Golding who

lived at the time in the same village in Wiltshire as Lovelock.) The

hypothesis had its origins in Lovelock’s work for the space programme

and his efforts to devise methods of detecting life on Mars. He began to

speculate on the fundamental differences between lifeless Mars and

abundant Earth. He decided that what he termed ‘Gaia’ was best seen

as ‘a complex entity involving the Earth’s biosphere, atmosphere,

oceans, and soil; the totality constituting a feedback or cybernetic

system which seeks an optimal physical and chemical environment for

life on this planet.’ Over the years he has continued to refine and restate

his ideas. Many scientists have criticised them but many have come to

accept their validity. They remain controversial but Lovelock’s vision of

an earth that is a self-regulating organism provides powerful support

for all of us appalled by our reckless assaults on our planetary environ -

ment. His daring new model of the world on which we live has only

gained greater relevance in the thirty years since it was first published.

�Read onThe Ages of Gaia; The Revenge of GaiaLynn Margulis, Symbiotic Planet; Peter Russell, The Global Brain;

Edward O. Wilson, The Diversity of Life


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READONATHEME: OUR PRECIOUS EARTH

Tim Flannery, The Weather MakersAl Gore, An Inconvenient TruthElizabeth Kolbert, Field Notes from a CatastropheMark Lynas, Six DegreesBill McGuire, Surviving ArmageddonGeorge Monbiot, Heat: How We Can Stop the Planet BurningFred Pearce, When the Rivers Run DryAlan Weisman, The World Without Us

MALCOLM X (1925–65) USA

THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF MALCOLM X (1965)Malcolm Little was born in Omaha, Nebraska, the son of an African-

American Baptist preacher, in 1925. When he was only six, his father

was found dead, almost certainly the victim of white vigilantes angered

by his support of black politicians and, some years later, his mother,

who had never recovered from her loss, was detained in a mental

hospital where she was to spend the rest of her life. Malcolm drifted

into crime and addiction and was imprisoned for ten years in 1946. In

prison, he became a Black Muslim and, once released, he reinvented

himself as a powerful advocate of black power and black separatism. He


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was soon renowned as a magnetically powerful public speaker. In 1964,

after a pilgrimage to Mecca, he announced his rejection of his

separatist beliefs and his new found conviction that good men of all

races could join together to combat discrimination and injustice. On 21

February 1965, Malcolm X was speaking at the Audubon Ballroom in

New York when he was shot several times by men who rose from their

seats in the audience and rushed the podium. He was pronounced

dead on arrival at a nearby hospital. Although three men were

eventually convicted of his assassination, controversy about who really

shot Malcolm X continues to this day. Whoever was guilty had killed one

of the most remarkable Americans of his generation as his auto -

biography demonstrates. Written by Alex Haley, and based on long

interviews with Malcolm X in the year before he was assassinated, the

book is a blazingly honest account of Malcolm’s life in crime, his

conversion to Islam (the undoubted turning point in his life) and the

spiritual and intellectual journey he had made. It is one of the most

powerful and revelatory documents to emerge from 1950s and 1960s

America and from the movement to fight racism and oppression.

�Read onMalcolm X Speaks (a selection from his speeches)

James Weldon Johnson, The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man;

Richard Wright, Black Boy


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NELSON MANDELA (b. 1918) SOUTH AFRICA

LONG WALK TO FREEDOMBorn into a high-status family in the Transkei, Nelson Mandela trained

as a lawyer and joined the African National Congress in 1944. He

campaigned against the racial segregation of apartheid from its

introduction into South Africa in 1948 and endured several periods of

imprisonment before he was given a life sentence in 1964. He remained

in jail for 26 years, an increasingly potent symbol of resistance to

apartheid. Released in 1990, he became the first black president of

South Africa four years later, guiding the country in its transition from

minority rule to true democracy. Long Walk to Freedom is the personal

testament of one of the moral and political giants of the twentieth

century, and charts Mandela’s journey from prison to presidency of a

new, apartheid-free South Africa. His enduring faith, through years of

hardship and imprisonment, that truth and justice could eventually

triumph over oppression is humbling. So, too, is his conviction that love

is ultimately a more powerful force in the world than hate. ‘No one is

born hating another person because of the colour of his skin, or his

background, or his religion,’ he writes. ‘People must learn to hate, and

if they can learn to hate, they can be taught to love, for love comes more

naturally to the human heart than its opposite.’ Given the story of

Mandela’s life, his hard-won belief carries a credibility that readers

cannot fail to find moving.

�Read onAnthony Sampson, Mandela: The Authorised Biography; Desmond

Tutu, The Rainbow People of God; Donald Woods, Biko


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NADEZHDA MANDELSTAM

NADEZHDA MANDELSTAM (1899–1980) RUSSIA

HOPE AGAINST HOPE (1970)The first of Nadezhda Mandelstam’s two harrowing but ultimately

uplifting memoirs of life in Stalinist Russia records the persecution she

and her husband, the poet Osip Mandelstam, endured. There is an

untranslatable pun embedded in the title of the memoir and its

successor, Hope Abandoned. The author’s first name, ‘Nadezhda’,

means ‘hope’ in Russian and, despite the title of the second volume,

the reader can take a strange kind of hope from Mandelstam’s writings.

From the tragic story of the destruction she witnessed and of her

husband‘s slow disintegration and death, she succeeds in creating a

masterpiece that bears witness to the ultimate triumph of creativity and

the liberated human spirit. Osip Mandelstam was already a renowned

poet in revolutionary Russia when he married a young Jewish woman

named Nadezhda Hazin in 1921. Throughout the 1920s and early 1930s,

his literary fame continued to grow but Mandelstam was constitution -

ally incapable of the kind of conformism required of writers in the Soviet

era. This was demonstrated most dangerously in 1933 when he wrote

what has been described as ‘a sixteen-line death sentence’ – an

acerbically satirical poem criticising Stalin. Mandelstam was not

immediately arrested but, within a year, he had been despatched into

exile and the last years of his life were made wretched by harrassment

and persecution. He died while in transit to a labour camp after he had

been sentenced to imprisonment for ‘counter-revolutionary activities’.

In his wife’s memoir his death becomes somehow emblematic of all the

suffering endured by the Russian people during the years of Stalin’s

‘Great Terror’. ‘If nothing else is left, one must scream,’ Nadezhda


Mandelstam wrote. ‘Silence is the real crime against humanity.’ Her

extraordinary book represents her refusal to acquiesce in such a crime.

�Read onHope AbandonedEvgenia Ginzburg, Into the Whirlwind; Varlam Shalamov, Kolyma Tales

GABRIEL GARCIA MARQUEZ (b. 1928)

COLOMBIA

ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF SOLITUDE (1967/1970)South America’s most admired novelist and winner of the Nobel Prize

for Literature in 1982, Gabriel Garcia Marquez began his career as a

journalist. His first stories, published in Spanish the mid-1950s,

introduced the imaginary town of Macondo which has been the setting

for much of his fiction, including his most famous novel, One HundredYears of Solitude. In its opening chapter, as Colonel Aureliano Buendia

faces a firing squad, the extraordinary history of generations of his

family unfolds in his mind. They begin as poor peasants in a one-

roomed hut on the edge of a swamp. They proliferate wildly until the

existence of the family and the existence of Macondo seem indissolubly

linked. Then, led by the Colonel, they defend the old values of the town

against invasion by a government which wants to impose the same

laws on Macondo as everywhere else. Finally, the dynasty disappears

from reality, living on only in fantasy, as a memory of how human beings

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GABRIEL GARCIA MARQUEZ

were before the world changed. Macondo is a town unlike any other

and its people, both the Buendias and others, live in the mind like few

other fictional characters. When the technological wonders of the

modern age reach Macondo, the townsfolk are unsure what to make of

them. ‘It was as if God had decided to put to the test every capacity for

surprise,’ Marquez writes, ‘and was keeping the inhabitants of Macondo

in a permanent alternation between excitement and disappointment,

doubt and revelation, to such an extreme that no one knew for certain

where the limits of reality lay.’ In the pages of his masterpiece it is

equally difficult to judge where the limits of reality lie. Possible and

impossible events intertwine, time dissolves and imagination takes

precedence in a narrative that renews the potential of fiction to re-

invent the world.


�Read onChronicle of a Death Foretold; The General in his LabyrinthAugusto Roa Bastos, I, the Supreme; Mario Vargas Llosa, The War ofthe End of the World


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YANN MARTEL (b. 1963) SPAIN/CANADA

LIFE OF PI (2001)Born in Spain of Canadian parents, Yann Martel had a peripatetic

childhood and youth, spending time in countries as diverse as Costa

Rica and Iran, France and India. He has continued to travel widely as an

adult. He studied philosophy at university in Canada and became a full-

time writer in his late twenties. His first book, a collection of short

stories entitled The Facts Behind the Helsinki Roccamatios, was pub -

lished in 1993 and was followed three years later by Self, an ambitious

novel about shifting sexual identities. Both books won some praise

from critics but this was as nothing compared to the acclaim that met

his second novel, Life of Pi which went on to win the 2002 Booker Prize.

The award of the Booker was certainly justified. The book is one of the

more extraordinary and inventive works of fiction to appear so far in the

twenty-first century. Martel clearly has confidence in the straightforward

power of story-telling but he also demonstrates belief in the ability of the

novel to bear the weight of philosophical speculation and digression as

well. Even the briefest precis of the plot gives some indi cation of how

unusual the book is. Teenage Piscine (‘Pi’) Patel, while attempting to

travel from India to a new life in Canada, becomes the sole human

survivor of the wreck of a cargo ship in the Pacific. Sharing a lifeboat with

an assortment of animal survivors of the shipwreck, including a zebra, a

hyena, an orang-utan and a 450-pound Bengal tiger named Richard

Parker, he has time to ponder his fate and his future as the makeshift ark

drifts across the ocean towards a landfall. Unique and uncategorisable,

Martel’s novel mingles elements of old-fashioned adventure stories with

meditations on the nature of faith and the value of religion.


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ANNE MICHAELS

�Read onThe Facts Behind the Helsinki Roccamatios; SelfDaniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe; Mark Haddon, The Curious Incident ofthe Dog in the Night-time

ANNE MICHAELS (b. 1958) CANADA

FUGITIVE PIECES (1997)Before the publication of Fugitive Pieces, the Canadian writer Anne

Michaels was known as a poet and the language of her first novel is

charged with the resonance and memorable imagery of the finest

poetry. At its heart is the story of Jakob Beer. At the beginning of the

novel, Jakob is a small boy who has fled the Nazis and the scene of his

parents’ murder and is in hiding in the forests of Poland. Covered in

mud and filth, he is discovered by Athos Roussos, a Greek scholar

excavating the ancient Polish city of Biskupin. Athos takes responsibility

for the boy and smuggles him out of Poland and back to his home on

the Greek island of Zakynthos. As Jakob grows up, Athos becomes his

beloved mentor, who introduces him to the pleasures of knowledge and

language and intellectual curiosity but the young man remains haunted

by his loss and, especially, by fleeting memories of a sister whose final

fate he has never learned. The narrative continues to follow Jakob as he

moves from Europe to Canada and back again, charting the failure of his

marriage, his attempts to come to terms with his extraordinary past and

his short-lived happiness with a much younger woman. Through the

story of Jakob and those whose lives he affects, Anne Michaels explores


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difficult ideas about the wounds that history inflicts on people and the

ways in which even the worst of them can be healed. ‘Hold a book in

your hand,’ Jakob says at one point in the novel, citing an old Hebrew

saying, ‘and you’re a pilgrim at the gates of a new city.’ Entering the new

city that is Fugitive Pieces is an experience that lingers long in the

memory.

�Read onCynthia Ozick, The Shawl; Bernhard Schlink, The Reader; Rachel

Seiffert, The Dark Room

ALICE MILLER (b. 1923) POLAND/SWITZERLAND

THE DRAMA OF THE GIFTED CHILD (1979/1981)Alice Miller is a psychologist and psychotherapist who was born in

Poland and moved to Switzerland as a young woman soon after the end

of the Second World War. She studied at the University of Basel, gaining

a PhD in 1953, and then worked as a psychoanalyst for more than

twenty years. In the 1970s, she began publishing a series of powerful

indictments of traditional methods of raising children, arguing that the

child’s well-being is regularly sacrificed to the interests of the parents.

A ‘poisonous pedagogy’ is too often used which damages the emotional

development of the child. Miller has written about extreme examples of

this – in her book For Your Own Good, for example, she analyses the

upbringings of Hitler and of serial killers – but her argument is that


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ALICE MILLER

‘poisonous pedagogy’ permeates society and that the many children

who suffer from it carry its effects with them through their entire lives.

The trauma of any kind of abuse in childhood – physical, sexual or

emotional – is longlasting. If parents, for whatever reasons, refuse to

acknowledge children as individuals, then the consequences are

terrible. ‘A little reflection soon shows,’ she writes in The Drama of theGifted Child, her first and still her most famous book, ‘how

inconceivable it is really to love others (not merely to need them), if one

cannot love oneself as one really is. And how could a person do that if,

from the very beginning, he has had no chance to experience his true

feelings and to learn to know himself?’ Miller writes movingly about the

ways in which childhood can become a prison for the real self but she

also offers hope that people can recover lost feelings and repressed

histories and thus free themselves from the chains of the past.

�Read onFor Your Own Good; Thou Shalt Not Be AwareSusan Forward, Toxic Parents


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READONATHEME: THE CHILD IS FATHER TO THE MAN

Virginia M. Axline, Dibs In Search of SelfJohn Bowlby, A Secure BaseMargaret Donaldson, Children’s MindsErik H. Erikson, Childhood and SocietyJohn Holt, How Children LearnJean Liedloff, The Continuum ConceptNeil Postman, The Disappearance of ChildhoodD.W. Winnicott, The Child, the Family and the Outside World

DAN MILLMAN (b. 1946) USA

THE WAY OF THE PEACEFUL WARRIOR (1980)Dan Millman was a world champion when he was still in his teens,

taking first place in the World Trampoline Championship in London in

1964 but early success only marked the beginning of a long spiritual

quest which he has chronicled in his books, the best known of which

remains The Way of the Peaceful Warrior. Cast in the form of thinly

disguised fiction, The Way of the Peaceful Warrior has a central charac -

ter named Dan who meets a mysterious mentor he dubs ‘Socrates’

working at a gas station. Socrates has a wisdom that Dan can only

admire and he passes on to the younger man his perceptions about the


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DAN MILLMAN

world and about the real nature of success in it. The old gas attendant

has no easy answers. The world is a difficult place. As Socrates says, ‘If

you don’t get what you want, you suffer; if you get what you don’t want,

you suffer; even when you get exactly what you want, you still suffer

because you can’t hold on to it forever.’ However, it is the mind that is

the predicament because it ‘wants to be free of change. Free of pain,

free of the obligations of life and death.’ The only way to escape the

chains of this way of thinking is to accept that ‘change is a law, and no

amount of pretending will alter that reality’. Once he has learned that

essential truth, Dan is able to embark on the odyssey which transforms

him into a ‘peaceful warrior’, living in the moment and taking pleasure

in it. Confidently sub-titled ‘A Book That Changes Lives’, The Way of thePeaceful Warrior has done exactly what it claims to do for many

people. Through its intriguing blend of fact and fiction, and through the

character of Socrates, it leads readers on a memorable journey.

�Read onThe Life You Were Born to Live; Sacred Journey of the PeacefulWarriorLouise Hay, You Can Heal Your Life; Anthony Robbins, Awaken theGiant Within; Robin S. Sharma, The Monk Who Sold His Ferrari;Eckhart Tolle, The Power of Now


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READONATHEME: IT’S ALL IN THE PSYCHOLOGY

Eric Berne, Games People PlayDale Carnegie, How to Win Friends and Influence PeopleMihaly Csikszentmihalyi, FlowClarissa Pinkola Estes, Women Who Run with WolvesShakti Gawain, Creative VisualizationJohn Gray, Men Are from Mars, Women Are from VenusSusan Jeffers, Feel the Fear and Do It AnywayRobin Norwood, Women Who Love Too MuchGail Sheehy, PassagesRobin Skynner & John Cleese, Families and How to Survive

Them

TONI MORRISON (b. 1931) USA

BELOVED (1987)In the fiction she has published over the last four decades, Toni

Morrison, winner of the 1993 Nobel Prize for Literature, has shown

herself to be one of the most profound and imaginative of all

interpreters of the black American experience. Her novels have ranged

from the story of a black girl obsessed by white standards of beauty


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TONI MORRISON

(The Bluest Eye) to an enigmatic exploration of racial and cultural

tension focused on an all-black township in Oklahoma (Paradise).

However, her finest work is usually acknowledged to be Beloved.

Loosely based on the real-life story of Margaret Garner, an escaped

slave who killed her own daughter rather than see her returned to

slavery, this is the tale of Sethe who, when the novel opens in the year

1873, is living in a house near Cincinatti with her daughter Denver. Sethe

harbours terrible memories of events years earlier when she escaped

from her brutal life as slave to a sadist. Her freedom was short-lived

and, when she was tracked down and recaptured, she tried to kill all

four of her children. Only a baby girl died and now, eighteen years later,

it seems that the ghost of that child has returned in the enigmatic shape

of ‘Beloved’, a young girl who represents not only Sethe’s lost child but

all the cruel legacy of slavery. Moving back and forth in time, and flitting

between the viewpoints of several different characters, Beloved is a

complicated but compelling narrative that brings the dehumanising

consequences of slavery vividly to life. All the characters are haunted by

the ghosts of history and Morrison provides no easy healing for the

damage they have all suffered. Her novel looks at African-American

history with unblinkered eyes and presents it to the reader with a

complete lack of sentimentality.

�Read onParadise; Song of SolomonCharles Johnson, Middle Passage; Steven Weisenburger, ModernMedea (historical study of the Margaret Garner case)


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FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE (1844–1900) GERMANY

THUS SPOKE ZARATHUSTRA (1883–85/1909)Nietzsche was born in a small town in Saxony where his father was the

Lutheran pastor and he was educated at the Schulpforta, a famous

German boarding school, and at the universities of Bonn and Leipzig.

He was a brilliant classical scholar and was offered a professorship at a

Swiss university when still only in his twenties. His university career

lasted for a decade until it was brought to an end by his ill health. He

then began a nomadic life, moving from city to city across Europe and

surviving as an independent scholar and writer. In 1889, while in Turin,

he suffered what was to be a permanent breakdown of his mental

health which left him an invalid in the care of his sister for the rest of his

life. Nietzsche was not, in any sense, a systematic philosopher,

rigorously pursuing an argument. His ideas emerge in a sequence of

devastatingly precise and resonant aphorisms and insights which move

swiftly from subject to subject, from art and music to science and

morality. He challenged most of the ruling assumptions and ideas of his

time. He rejected Christianity, with its emphasis on humility and

submission to an objectively existing God, as the morality of the slave.

Instead he believed in an extreme form of subjective idealism: that we

live in a self-created world which is the projection of our own minds.

There is no objectively existing ‘reality’ beyond the creative powers of

the human will. Probably no great philosopher has been so

misunderstood as Nietzsche. His ideas have been seized upon and

twisted out of recognition by later generations, most damagingly for his

reputation by the Nazis. However, it is also true to say that no other


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great philosopher can speak so directly and challengingly to ordinary

readers. Read a book like Thus Spoke Zarathustra and the world will

never seem quite the same again.

�Read onBeyond Good and Evil; Ecce HomoWalter Benjamin, Illuminations; Elias Canetti, Crowds and Power;

Arthur Schopenhauer, Essays and Aphorisms

MICHAEL ONDAATJE (b. 1943) SRI LANKA/

CANADA

THE ENGLISH PATIENT (1992)Born in Sri Lanka, Michael Ondaatje spent his childhood there and in

England and then moved to Canada as a young man. After studying in

Toronto and Kingston, Ontario, he became a university lecturer in

English literature and a poet. When he started to write fiction, it was in

a prose that was as rich, dense and allusive as his verse. Early,

experimental novels like Coming Through Slaughter and TheCollected Works of Billy the Kid won him admirers but it was only with

the publication of The English Patient, which won the Booker Prize and

was later transformed by Anthony Minghella into a successful film, that

Ondaatje gained a much wider audience. Written in a prose that lingers

on the details of the visible world and unfolding its story in a complex

jigsaw of interlocking scenes, the novel is a compelling exploration of


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love, memory and desire. As the Second World War drags to its con -

clusion, a nurse and her patient, an Englishman burnt beyond

recognition and swathed in bandages, are holed up in a villa near

Florence after the retreat of the Germans. Two other damaged indi -

viduals, a Sikh bomb disposal expert and a former criminal who has

suffered torture, are now the villa’s only other occupants. As the nurse

and her two companions enter into complex relationships of their own

and speculate about the enigma of the English patient, he returns in his

own mind to North Africa before the war and to memories of an intense

but doomed love affair. In The English Patient, narrative provides the

bare bones on which Ondaatje hangs his often haunting and beautiful

language and imagery. The novel stays in the memory long after it has

been read, a reminder of just how poignant and enigmatic fiction can be.

�Read onAnil’s GhostPaul Bowles, The Sheltering Sky; D.M. Thomas, The White Hotel

BORIS PASTERNAK (1890–1960) RUSSIA

DR. ZHIVAGO (1958)In Russia, Pasternak is best known as a poet; in the West, readers know

him for his novel Dr. Zhivago which provoked a savage response from

the Soviet authorities of the time. They banned the book and made him

renounce the Nobel Prize he was awarded in 1958, the same year the


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first British edition of his masterpiece appeared. Pasternak’s powerful

and gripping novel follows the doomed love affair of an idealistic poet

and doctor, Yuri Zhivago, and a teacher, Lara, as it is played out against

the epic backdrop of the Russian Revolution and Civil War. In the story

of these two people caught up in world-changing historical events,

human emotions of love and generosity are championed in a time when

hatred, division and violence have taken hold. ‘The whole human way

of life has been destroyed and ruined,’ Lara says at one point in the

novel. ‘All that’s left is the bare, shivering human soul, stripped to the

last shred, the naked force of the human psyche for which nothing has

changed because it was always cold and shivering and reaching out to

its nearest neighbour, as cold and lonely as itself.’ Neither Zhivago nor

Lara survive the events chronicled in the novel. After enduring much in

his service as a medical officer in Tsarist and revolutionary armies, he

dies of a heart attack in Moscow. She disappears from the novel and

from history, probably a victim (although it is never explicitly stated) of

State terrorism. Yet their love, enjoyed in the few snatched moments

that history allows them, somehow transcends their deaths. Despite all

the suffering and the pain that Pasternak’s narrative records, it is the

love between them and the human emotions they embody that readers

remember and that Pasternak invites us to celebrate.

�Read onThe Last SummerMikhail Bulgakov, The White Guard; Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace


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M. SCOTT PECK (1936–2005) USA

THE ROAD LESS TRAVELLED (1978)Born in New York City, M. Scott Peck studied at Harvard and then served

for a decade as a psychiatrist in the US Army. After a further ten years in

private practice, he was in a position to redirect his energies towards

working as an inspirational speaker. The means for doing this were

provided by The Road Less Travelled, first published in 1978 but a

bestseller throughout the 1980s and beyond. Many self-help gurus gain

their successes by offering apparently pain-free ways to achieve all that

potential disciples have dreamed of achieving. Scott Peck is not that

kind of guru. ‘Life is difficult,’ he states in the famous opening sentence

of The Road Less Travelled. ‘This is a great truth,’ he continues, ‘one of

the greatest truths. It is a great truth because once we truly see this

truth, we transcend it. Once we truly know that life is difficult – once we

truly understand and accept it – then life is no longer difficult. Because

once it is accepted, the fact that life is difficult no longer matters.’

Paradoxically it is probably because of the author’s refusal to don rose-

tinted glasses that his book has had the success it has had. Honesty

and the admission that there is no easy path to happiness and

enlightenment have their own attractions. Peck believes that people are

only too likely to turn their backs on responsibility and opportunities to

embrace real freedom. Many will refuse to change and the road to a

richer life is, indeed, the road less travelled. However, for those prepared

to take it, the rewards are substantial. Peck’s books – ‘self-help books

that are read by people who don’t read self-help books’, as one admirer

described them – are essential guides to the journey along the road.


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�Read onFurther Along the Road Less Travelled; People of the LieHarold Kushner, When Bad Things Happen to Good People; Thomas

Moore, Care of the Soul

STEVEN PINKER (b. 1954) CANADA

HOW THE MIND WORKSWhy do our minds work in the ways that they do? There can be few more

intriguing questions we can ask ourselves and, over the last fifteen

years, the Canadian academic Steven Pinker has done more than

almost anybody to provide general readers with answers to it. Before

the publication of The Language Instinct in 1994, Pinker was already

well-known in his field as an innovative thinker on the development of

language in children. His much-praised first book for a general

readership brought his ideas to a wider public. In it he argues that the

capacity for language is imprinted in the biological structure of our

brains and develops spontaneously in the growing child. Language is

an instinct. People know how to talk in the same way that spiders know

how to spin webs or eagles know how to fly. His second book was more

ambitious as its title suggests. In How the Mind Works he extends his

approach to language to cover all the functions of the mind from vision

to memory, consciousness to the emotions. Drawing on scientific

disciplines like cognitive science and (particularly) evolutionary

psychology, Pinker advances a model of the human mind that com -


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bines the theory of computation and Darwinian evolution. And, along

the way, he gives answers to such unexpected questions as why a

man’s salary tends to increase as his height does and what happens

when we fall in love. The subjects that Pinker tackles are weighty ones

but he writes about them with a lightness and a clarity that make even

the most difficult of concepts comprehensible to non-specialists. Howthe Mind Works (and his later volumes like The Blank Slate) allow us

all to enter cutting-edge scientific debates about human nature and the

human mind.

�Read onThe Blank Slate; The Language Instinct; The Stuff of ThoughtAntonio C. Damasio, The Feeling of What Happens; Robert Wright, TheMoral Animal

ROBERT M. PIRSIG (b. 1928) USA

ZEN AND THE ART OF MOTORCYCLE MAINTENANCE (1974)Growing up in Minnesota, Robert Pirsig was a gifted child with an

unusually high IQ who gained a place to study biochemistry at

university when he was still only in his mid-teens. As an adult he

struggled at first to find his way in life. He served with the US military in

Korea where he developed an interest in Buddhism and, on his return

to the US, he became a teacher and lecturer. In his early thirties, he


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suffered a breakdown which resulted in his spending time in a mental

hospital where he underwent electric shock therapy. When Zen and theArt of Motorcycle Maintenance was first published, it was immediately

recognised as utterly original and memorable, a book that attempts to

blend Eastern and Western thought into a unique and uncategorisable

whole. At its simplest, Pirsig’s narrative is the story of a motorcycle trip

he takes across America, accompanied by his young son, but there is

much more to it than first appears. At its heart, however, is his vision of

a world where the rationality of the West and the non-intellectual

insights of the East can be reconciled. To Pirsig, the two are not

necessarily in conflict.‘The Buddha,’ he writes, ‘resides as comfortably

in the circuits of a digital computer or the gears of a cycle transmission

as he does at the top of a mountain or in the petals of a flower.’ Reason

and logic, as represented by the motorcycle and its maintenance, are

important but so too are the intuition and creativity, represented by the

Buddha. Robert Pirsig turns the trip he and his son make into a personal

odyssey in search of what is true, real and valuable in life. Striving to

heal the age-old division between science and mysticism, he creates a

philosophical masterpiece.

�Read onLila: An Inquiry into Morals (more of Pirsig’s ideas about what he calls

a ‘Metaphysics of Quality’)

William Least-Heat Moon, Blue Highways; Peter Matthiessen, TheSnow Leopard; Ted Simon, Jupiter’s Travels


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SYLVIA PLATH (1932–63) USA

THE BELL JAR (1963)Sylvia Plath, remembered as much for her difficult relationship with the

late Poet Laureate Ted Hughes and for her suicide as she is for her

poetry, also wrote a semi-autobiographical novel, first published under

a pseudonym a month before her death. The Bell Jar tells the story of

Esther Greenwood, a brilliant young college student who is given the

chance to work in the exhilarating world of New York journalism. The

year is 1953 and ideas of femininity and the correct social roles for

women are in flux. Esther is torn between rebellion and conformity,

between her ambitions to excel as a writer and a nagging wish simply

to succumb to convention and marry her boyfriend Buddy. She realises

that she has been handed a golden opportunity but she seems unable

to take full advantage of it. She feels alienated from the excitements of

city life and this feeling only increases when she fails to win acceptance

on a prestigious writing course and is obliged to return to suburban life

for the summer. The narrative charts Esther’s descent into profound

depression, her attempt at suicide, her treatment in hospital and her

eventual return, through time and therapy, to the ordinary world. Plath’s

novel takes as its subject some of the bleakest feelings that a person

can endure. Her sense of misery and separation from the world makes

Esther feel like she is trapped under a laboratory bell jar, deprived of all

air. She struggles to make any connection with reality. ‘To the person in

the bell jar, blank and stopped as a dead baby,’ as it says in the novel,

‘the world itself is the bad dream.’ Yet the novel is not, in the final

analysis, a depressing one. At the end of the book, Esther’s renewed


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ANNIE PROULX

ability to function in the world, however compromised and threatened

by the unknown future it is, seems like a kind of triumph.

�Read onJohnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams; Letters HomeSusanna Kaysen, Girl, Interrupted; Elizabeth Wurtzel, Prozac Nation

ANNIE PROULX (b. 1935) USA

THE SHIPPING NEWS (1993)Annie Proulx did not begin publishing fiction until she was in her fifties

but her original (often dark) imagination, her evocative use of

landscape and setting, her quirky humour and arresting use of

language brought her swift success. Today, she is probably best known

for ‘Brokeback Mountain’, a poignant story of two Wyoming ranch-

hands drawn into an unexpected and intense sexual relationship.

However, before the Hollywood movie version made that novella

famous, she gained attention (and the Pulitzer Prize) with her full-

length novel, The Shipping News. At the beginning of the book, the

central character Quoyle is an unsuccessful newspaperman in New

York, still brooding on the humiliations of his marriage to a woman who

first betrayed him and then was killed in an accident, leaving him with

two small children. Accompanied by his young daughters and by a

formidable maiden aunt, he returns to Newfoundland, his father’s

birthplace, and there he finds the fulfilment that eluded him in the city.


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He establishes himself at the local newspaper, finds himself drawn into

the daily life of the community and emerges from the protective shell of

loneliness to begin a new and rewarding relationship. More optimistic

about human possi bility than much of Proulx’s other work, TheShipping News is saved from the banality an outline of its plot might

suggest by her wit, originality and skilful unravelling of events. Quoyle’s

transformation becomes an offbeat celebration of the potential people

have for change. As Proulx, in the charged and poetic language she

employs to such great effect in The Shipping News, says, ‘Water may

be older than light, diamonds crack in hot goat’s blood, mountaintops

give off cold fire, forests appear in mid-ocean; it may happen that a crab

is caught with the shadow of a hand on its back, and that the wind be

imprisoned in a bit of knotted string. And it may be that love sometimes

occurs without pain or misery.’

�Read onAccordion Crimes; Close Range (a collection of short stories that

includes the well-known novella ‘Brokeback Mountain’)

Marilynne Robinson, Gilead; Richard Russo, Empire Falls

JAMES REDFIELD (b. 1950) USA

THE CELESTINE PROPHECY (1993)James Redfield, a therapist who had quit his job to work as a writer,

could scarcely have imagined what the future was to hold when he self-


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JAMES REDFIELD

published The Celestine Prophecy in 1993. He began by selling it into

bookshops himself but its word-of-mouth success was such that the

rights were bought by a major publisher and Redfield’s blend of

adventure narrative and self-help book (‘half Indiana Jones and half

Scott Peck’, as one reviewer described it) became one of the biggest

bestsellers of the 1990s. The Celestine Prophecy is presented as a

novel. In the rain forests of Peru an ancient manuscript has been

discovered. In its pages are nine insights into the nature and meaning

of life. The narrator of the story decides to head for South America to

learn more of the manuscript and its spiritual truths but he discovers

that the powers that be, in both state and Church, are disturbed by the

idea that the insights will be further disseminated and are prepared to

go to great lengths to stop this. As the narrator learns each insight, one

by one, and sees each one begin to operate in his life, he is also obliged

to escape the dangerous attentions of those who wish to keep the

insights to themselves. The story of The Celestine Prophecy is not

always a particularly compelling one nor its characters particularly

convincing. Redfield is no great novelist and his novel is intended

primarily as a vehicle for the nine insights. These begin with the aware -

ness that a new spiritual awakening is underway and that individuals

can only achieve their full potential if they align themselves with it. From

this basis, they move towards the revelation of how humans can evolve

into a new dimension of existence. Sophisticated sceptics may mock

The Celestine Prophecy but, as its startling word-of-mouth success

indicates, it speaks very directly to millions of people.


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�Read onThe Tenth Insight; The Secret of ShambhalaMitch Albom, The Five People You Meet in Heaven; Neale Donald

Walsch, Conversations with God

LUKE RHINEHART (b. 1932) USA

THE DICE MAN (1971)A bored and unhappy psychiatrist named Luke Rhinehart has a moment

of revelation. He decides that, in future, he will make no conscious

decisions about his life. Instead, he will allow the fall of the dice to

determine his actions. He will merely put forward options and then let

the dice choose between them. By this simple means he will shake

himself out of the inertia and the tedium which have come to dominate

his life. As he says, looking back on his experiment, ‘breaking my

established patterns was threatening to my deeply ingrained selves and

pricked me to a level of consciousness which is unusual, unusual since

the whole instinct of human behavior is to find environments congenial

to the relaxation of consciousness. By creating problems for myself I

created thought.’ As he goes on to acknowledge, ‘I also created prob -

lems’. The Dice Man chronicles, with deadpan humour, the freedoms

and the problems that rolling the dice brings to Rhinehart’s life.

Appropriately for a novel so enthralled by the mysteries of chance and

randomness, its author remains an enigma. Is he really a psychiatrist

named Luke Rhinehart? Or is he George Cockroft, sometime psychol -


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ogist and university teacher? Could he even be H.F. Saint, author of a

book called Memoirs of an Invisible Man? No one seems sure. What is

certain is that The Dice Man is a novel like few others – a subversive,

scary and liberating exploration of what life might be like if it was

guided by the throw of a dice. Some of the earlier editions of the novel

carried the confident tagline that, ‘This book can change your life.’ It’s a

claim made by publishers on behalf of many books but, when applied

to The Dice Man, it may just be true.

�Read onThe Search for the Dice ManChuck Palahniuk, Fight Club; H.F. Saint, Memoirs of an Invisible Man;

Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Black Swan (a non-fiction investigation of

the power of unpredictability in our lives)

SOGYAL RINPOCHE (b. 1950?) TIBET

THE TIBETAN BOOK OF LIVING AND DYING (1992)Born in eastern Tibet and recognised at an early age as the

reincarnation of a famous Buddhist teacher, Sogyal Rinpoche grew up

in the mountainous Indian state of Sikkim and went on to study at

university in Delhi before travelling to the West in the early 1970s. For

the last thirty years he has been one of the most prominent interpreters

of Buddhism to Western audiences, both through his writings and

through the international organisation he founded and called Rigpa.


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The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying, which has been a bestseller in

a number of different European languages, provides a wide-ranging

survey of Tibetan Buddhist ideas about the present life and the life (or

lives) to come. To Western minds, the experience of dying is often seen

as one that is too anxiety-provoking to contemplate. To Rinpoche and

other Buddhists, it is only through contemplation of death that the joys

of life can be revealed. ‘When we finally know we are dying’, Rinpoche

writes, ‘and all other sentient beings are dying with us, we start to have

a burning, almost heartbreaking sense of the fragility and preciousness

of each moment and each being, and from this can grow a deep, clear,

limitless compassion for all beings.’ Paradoxically to Western eyes, the

contemplation of death opens the gate to a fuller life. In his book,

Rinpoche explains ideas of karma and rebirth which are central to a

specifically Buddhist tradition but much of what he writes about the

value of the impermanent world in which we presently find ourselves,

about the nature of spirituality and the best means to nurture it, is

applicable to the lives of us all. The Tibetan Book of Living and Dyingcan help people of many faiths and none to understand the meaning of

life and the place of death within it.

�Read onThe Future of BuddhismThe Tibetan Book of the DeadWalpola Rahula, What the Buddha Taught


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J.K. ROWLING

READONATHEME: MAKING SENSE OF DEATH

Mitch Albom, Tuesdays with MorrieSimone de Beauvoir, A Very Easy DeathElisabeth Kubler-Ross, On Death and DyingStephen Levine, Who Dies?; An Investigation of Conscious

Living and Conscious DyingThomas Lynch, The UndertakingSherwin B. Nuland, How We Die

J.K. ROWLING (b. 1965) UK

HARRY POTTER AND THE PHILOSOPHER’S STONE(1997)It is difficult to believe that, only a little over a decade ago, the names

of Harry Potter, Hermione Granger and Ron Weasley were unknown and

Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry was not a familiar location

to millions and millions of children (and adults) around the world. So

enormous has been the success of J.K. Rowling’s books and the films

that have followed them that the characters seem to have been around

for ever. Her own story – her journey from struggling single mother to

her present position as one of the richest and bestselling authors of all

time – seems like a contemporary fairy story. And the novel with which


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she first made her mark is a tale of magical transformations and hidden

powers suddenly revealed. When we are first introduced to our hero in

Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone he is a nobody, sleeping

under the stairs in a house where he is unwelcome. Harry, of course,

has secrets of which even he knows nothing and it is not long before the

poor relative has been whisked away from the Dursleys and sent to

Hogwarts. There he meets new friends, tests out his skills as a wizard

and learns just a little of the destiny which will pit him against Lord

Voldemort in a titanic struggle of good against evil. There is no doubt

about the status of the Harry Potter volumes as life-changing books for

many people. Rowling’s impact on young readers has been incalc -

ulable. No writer has done more to inspire young readers with a love for

fiction than she has and the first adventure of her bespectacled would-

be wizard introduces him (and us) to Hogwarts, the most extraordinary

school in the world, and to the assortment of beguiling characters who

spend their time there.

�Read onHarry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets; Harry Potter and thePrisoner of Azkaban (the next two titles in the series of seven books in

all)

Michael Ende, The Neverending Story; Philip Pullman, Northern Lights(the first in the His Dark Materials series)


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ANTOINE DE SAINT EXUPÉRY

ANTOINE DE SAINT EXUPÉRY (1900–44)

FRANCE

THE LITTLE PRINCE (1943)Antoine de Saint Exupéry learned to fly when he was a young man and

his careers as aviator and author unfolded in tandem in the late 1920s

and 1930s. Works like Southern Mail and Night Flight drew on his

experiences as a pilot in both Europe and South America. Wind, Sandand Stars, first published on the eve of the Second World War, mixes

philosophy and lyrical prose in its descriptions of flying on dangerous

mail runs across the Sahara and some of the highest peaks in the

Andes. Saint Exupéry’s most famous work by far remains The LittlePrince, written when he was living briefly in the USA in 1942 and

published the following year. Superficially this is a simple children’s tale

about a pilot who crashes his plane in the Sahara and there meets a

‘little prince’, an extraterrestrial young boy from a tiny asteroid, who

tells him of life on his own world and of his interplanetary travels. Yet,

beneath the external trappings of the children’s story, is a much more

profound parable about human life. At its core is the belief that only by

retaining a child’s vision of the world can a person display true maturity,

a truth that most adults have forgotten. ‘It is only with the heart that one

can see rightly,’ the little prince says, ‘what is essential is invisible to the

eye.’ Saint Exupéry went on to fight with the Free French forces during

the war and was killed in 1944 when his aircraft crashed into the

Mediterranean during a routine intelligence mission. His fable of the

‘little prince’, filled with wit and wisdom and fuelled by a gentle

awareness of the power of love and innocence to transform our lives,

continues to charm readers more than six decades after his death.


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�Read onNight Flight; Southern Mail; Wind, Sand and StarsBeryl Markham, West with the Night; Consuelo de Saint Exupéry, TheTale of the Rose (memoir by Saint Exupéry’s widow); Oscar Wilde, TheHappy Prince and Other Stories

J.D. SALINGER (b. 1919) USA

THE CATCHER IN THE RYE (1951)Over the years, J.D. Salinger has become as famous for his reclusive ness

as he has for the quality of his work. His published output consists of

one novel and a handful of short stories. He has not allowed any new

work to appear in print since 1965. Yet he remains one of the most

acclaimed American writers of the last century. Much of his reputation

rests on that one novel – The Catcher in the Rye. The book tells the

story of troubled teenager Holden Caulfield who is about to be expelled

from his boarding school. Appalled by the phoniness of the adult world,

Holden runs away to New York and checks into a hotel where he begins

to contemplate what the future holds for him. As he mooches about the

city, struggling to make sense of life, himself and the opposite sex, he

broods on possible courses of action. Should he hitchhike out west and

start a new life away from everybody he knows? Should he lose his

virginity and, if so, how? Told in Holden’s distinctive voice, The Catcherin the Rye is a portrait of adolescent angst that strikes a chord with

anyone who knows or remembers how confusing growing up can be.

Holden has his own literary opinions. At one point in his story, he


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remarks that, ‘What really knocks me out is a book, when you’re all done

reading it, you wished the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of

yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it.’

Salinger’s great achievement in The Catcher in the Rye – and it’s as

true now as it was when it was published – is that his novel reads

exactly like the kind of book that Holden so admired.


�Read onFor Esmé with Love and Squalor; Franny and ZooeyStephen Chbosky, The Perks of Being a Wallflower; F. Scott Fitzgerald,

The Great Gatsby; Mark Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

ERIC SCHLOSSER (b. 1959) USA

FAST FOOD NATION (2001)Schlosser is an investigative journalist who, before his assault on the fast

food industry, was best known for ‘Reefer Madness’, a long article on the

contradictions and illogic of the USA’s official policy on marijuana which

was first published in Atlantic Monthly. Fast Food Nation, which began

life a series of articles for Rolling Stone, is an unflinching exposé of

what, in the words of its subtitle, ‘the all-American meal is doing to the

world’. The book is premised on the belief that, as Schlosser says, ‘A

nation’s diet can be more revealing than its art or literature.’ The claim

might seem an exaggerated one but Schlosser has the statistics to back


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it up. ‘Americans,’ he writes, ‘now spend more money on fast food than

on higher education, personal computers, computer software, or new

cars. They spend more on fast food than on movies, books, magazines,

newspapers, videos, and recorded music – combined.’ If we assume that

people spend most money on those things they most love, then

Americans really love fast food. And both for America and the rest of the

world the consequences of that love are often disastrous. For consumers

the exponential expansion of fast food has meant a growing epidemic of

obesity and all the health problems associated with it. As Schlosser

points out, ‘it seems wherever America’s fast food chains go, waistlines

inevitably start expanding’. For those in the production line of fast food,

it has meant exploitation and poor working conditions. Because of the

myriad methods by which marketing men in the industry target the

young, all the problems associated with fast food are likely to grow

worse rather than better unless we radically change our attitudes to

consumption. Read Fast Food Nation and you will never look at food and

eating in the same way again.

�Read onReefer Madness and Other Tales from the American UndergroundBarbara Ehrenreich, Nickel and Dimed; Morgan Spurlock, Don’t EatThis Book


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E.F. SCHUMACHER

E.F. SCHUMACHER (1911–77) GERMANY/UK

SMALL IS BEAUTIFUL (1973)Ernst Schumacher was born in Germany but came to Britain before the

Second World War to escape living under the Nazi regime of the 1930s.

Briefly interned during the war, he worked on economic planning for the

welfare state reforms instituted by Attlee’s Labour government and

then, for twenty years, as chief economic adviser to the National Coal

Board. Steeped in the traditional ideas of economists, Schumacher was

sufficient of an individual and a maverick to be able to think outside the

box and to question some of the most basic assumptions of his peers.

Perhaps the best summary of his philosophy can be found in the

subtitle to his most famous book. Small Is Beautiful is ‘a study of

economics as if people mattered’. The central criticism he made of

existing economic systems was not only that they ignored the real

needs of real people but that all of them, especially western capitalism,

encouraged an entirely unrealistic view of the world and its resources.

‘An attitude to life which seeks fulfilment in the single-minded pursuit

of wealth – in short, materialism – does not fit into this world,’ he wrote,

‘because it contains within itself no limiting principle, while the

environment in which it is placed is strictly limited.’ Schumacher went

on to write other books, including A Guide for the Perplexed (once

described as ‘a statement of the philosophical underpinnings that

inform Small is Beautiful’), but it is the earlier work that remains the

most influential. Schumacher was a man ahead of his time – a

remarkable intellectual pioneer of ecology, sustainable development

and appropriate technology. As the decades pass and the threats of


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over-development and dwindling global resources grow, Small isBeautiful is likely to seem more and more prescient in its arguments.

�Read onGood Work; A Guide for the PerplexedJ.K. Galbraith, The Affluent Society; D. Meadows et al, Limits to Growth;

Barbara Wood Schumacher, Small Is Still Beautiful

ERNEST SHACKLETON (1874–1922) IRELAND

SOUTH (1919)Shackleton is one of the great names from what is known, quite rightly,

as the ‘heroic age’ of polar exploration. A member of Captain Scott’s

first expedition to the Antarctic, he organised his own attempt to reach

the South Pole in the years 1907 to 1909 and came within 100 miles of

reaching his goal before being obliged to turn back. His book Southrecords his experiences and those of the men he led in the British

Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition which left England a few years after

Scott’s doomed journey to the Pole. The aim of the expedition was to

make the first land crossing of the Antarctic continent but Shackleton’s

ship, the Endurance, was trapped by the pack ice before reaching the

intended landing point. His men were forced to abandon ship and, after

months of drifting on ice floes, to take refuge on the desolate Elephant

Island. Realising that there was no possibility of rescue otherwise,

Shackleton and five others set off in a 7-metre-long lifeboat on an 800-


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READ ON A THEME: EXPLORATION AND ENDURANCE

mile journey through frozen seas to South Georgia where the men living

on remote whaling stations offered the hope of contact with civilisation.

The boat came ashore on the opposite side of the island to the stations

and Shackleton and his companions were obliged to make the first

crossing of the mountainous South Georgia in order to reach them.

Eventually, all the men left on Elephant Island were rescued. ‘We had

pierced the veneer of outside things,’ Shackleton writes of what he and

his men had endured. Later he adds, ‘We had reached the naked soul

of man.’ As a record of the journey, both spiritual and physical, that the

polar explorers made, South is an unforgettable narrative. It is one of

the most harrowing and yet most uplifting of all stories of survival in a

hostile environment.

�Read onApsley Cherry-Garrard, The Worst Journey in the World; Alfred Lansing,

Endurance: Shackleton’s Incredible Voyage; Robert Falcon Scott,

Journals: Scott’s Last Expedition

READONATHEME: EXPLORATION AND ENDURANCE

Richard Henry Dana, Two Years Before the MastHeinrich Harrer, Seven Years in TibetSven Hedin, My Life as an ExplorerThor Heyerdahl, Kon-Tiki


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Sebastian Junger, The Perfect StormMary Kingsley, Travels in West AfricaJon Krakauer, Into Thin AirFridtjof Nansen, Farthest NorthSlavomir Rawicz, The Long WalkPiers Paul Read, AliveJoe Simpson, Touching the VoidWilfred Thesiger, Arabian Sands

CAROL SHIELDS (1935–2003) CANADA/USA

THE STONE DIARIES (1993)Carol Shields was born in Illinois but she married a Canadian when she

was in her early 20s and most of her adult life was spent in Canada

where she taught English literature at universities and published a

series of highly-acclaimed novels. Like Jane Austen, whom she admired

greatly, she was a novelist with an ability to write about apparently

ordinary people, leading lives that might be considered, from the

outside, to be narrow and restricted, and yet to find within her

characters elements of the extraordinary. Her finest novel is The StoneDiaries which is the story of an ‘ordinary’ woman’s life from birth in

rural Canada to her death in a Florida nursing home 90 years later.

Daisy Goodwill Flett, as the chapter headings of the book (Birth,


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CAROL SHIELDS

Childhood, Marriage, Love etc) ironically underline, lives in one sense a

conventional life as (in her son’s words at her memorial service) ‘wife,

mother, citizen of our century’. In another sense her life is most uncon -

ven tional, including elements that would not have looked out of place

in a magic-realist novel. Her mother dies in childbirth without even

realising she is pregnant. A neighbour returns to his native Orkney and

lives to the age of 115, proud of his ability to recite Jane Eyre from

memory. And the novel in which Daisy’s life is told is far from con -

ventional. It mimics the form of a non-fiction biography with family tree,

photographs of family members, excerpts from letters, journals,

newspaper articles and so on. In a poignant, knowing and funny nar -

rative, Carol Shields carefully unfolds the remarkable story of a

supposedly unremarkable woman. Once encountered on the pages of

Shields’s novel, Daisy Goodwill Flett is never forgotten. As one critic

wrote at the time of the book’s first publication, ‘The Stone Diariesreminds us again why literature matters’.

�Read onLarry’s Party; Mary SwannMargaret Laurence, The Stone Angel; Anne Tyler, Breathing Lessons


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PETER SINGER (b. 1946) AUSTRALIA

ANIMAL LIBERATION (1975)What rights do non-human animals have? How far should we, as moral

beings, consider these rights when we are making decisions which

affect them? In 1975, the Australian philosopher Peter Singer published

what has become, in many ways, the central text for the animal

liberation movement. The book was called simply Animal Liberationand it condemned what Singer called ‘the tyranny of human over non-

human animals’. As Singer went on to say, it was (and is) intended for

‘people who are concerned about ending oppression and exploitation

wherever they occur, and in seeing that the basic moral principle of

equal consideration of interests is not arbitrarily restricted to members

of our own species.’ If we believe that discrimination should not take

place on the basis of race or sex, then it is logical to believe that we

should not discriminate on the basis of species. Speciesism is as

morally reprehensible as racism and sexism. Other species are sentient

and as capable as us of suffering. As the utilitarian philosopher Jeremy

Bentham said two centuries ago, ‘The question is not, Can they reason?,

nor, Can they talk? But, Can they suffer?’ It is quite clear that animals can

suffer and Singer spends a good part of Animal Liberation exposing just

how we inflict pain on other species in two particular areas – animal

experimentation and factory farming. Singer’s book is so powerful

because it is much more than a dry exercise in academic philos ophy. He

provides an intellectual underpinning for the animal rights’ movement

but he also provides an impassioned plea for a new morality and a

practical agenda for changing our lives so that animals no longer suffer


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at our hands. The campaign against speciesism may well prove one of

the more important movements of the twenty-first century and it is

impossible to imagine it without the work of Peter Singer.

�Read onThe Ethics of What We EatStephen L. Clark, Animals and their Moral Standing; Tom Regan, TheCase for Animal Rights

ALEXANDER SOLZHENITSYN (1918–2008)

RUSSIA

ONE DAY IN THE LIFE OF IVAN DENISOVICH(1962/1963)In 1945, Alexander Solzhenitsyn was an artillery officer in the Red Army

who had been twice decorated for bravery and dedication to duty when

he made the mistake of criticising Stalin in a private letter. His criticism

came to the notice of the authorities and he was sentenced to an eight-

year term in a labour camp. After his release he worked as a maths

teacher and began to write. The novella One Day in the Life of IvanDenisovich first appeared in Russian in the literary magazine Novy Mirin 1962, reportedly only after Khrushchev had given his permission for

it to do so, and it was published in an English translation the following

year. The book does exactly what its title suggests. It chronicles one day

in the life of an inmate of a Soviet prison camp. Ivan Denisovich


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Shukhov feels ill when he awakes but he is none the less forced to

undertake hard manual labour alongside his fellow prisoners. Through

Shukhov’s eyes, we see the everyday routine of the camp, the relentless

obsession with food, the attempts by the inmates to gain some small

advantages in the struggle for survival. With its simple, unadorned

language and the obvious authenticity of its descriptions of life in the

camps of the Gulag, the book caused a sensation both in the Soviet

Union and abroad. Solzhenitsyn’s period in official favour proved a

short one. By the mid-sixties, his work was appearing only in samizdat

publications and, in the mid-seventies, the writer went into an exile in

the West that lasted twenty years. His later work was more epic in scale

but, arguably, nothing Solzhenitsyn wrote subsequently had the same

direct impact on readers as One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. It

is a short book but one that has much to say about human nature

stripped to its basics.

�Read onCancer Ward; The Gulag ArchipelagoFyodor Dostoyevsky, The House of the Dead; Vasily Grossman, Life andFate; Arthur Koestler, Darkness at Noon


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ART SPIEGELMAN

ART SPIEGELMAN (b. 1948) SWEDEN/USA

MAUS (1972–91)Once described by Alan Moore as ‘perhaps the single most important

comic creator working within the field’, Art Spiegelman began his career

on the proliferating underground ‘comix’ of the late 1960s and early

1970s. His greatest achievement has been to use the style and format

of the comic book to tackle a subject that most people would have

assumed to be beyond the reach of the genre – the Holocaust. Drawing

on the recollections of his parents and their experiences as Polish Jews

of Nazi persecution, Spiegelman spent nearly twenty years developing

and refining the graphic work which, in effect, told their tale. Mausbegan its existence as a few strips in an underground comic and

eventually became a long, two-volume masterpiece. In its final form, it

chronicles the life of Vladek Spiegelman, Art’s father, in various towns in

south Poland during the late 1930s and the events which led him to

Auschwitz but it also jumps forward in time and records the new life

Vladek forged for himself and his family in New York. The characters in

the comic are anthropomorphically portrayed as animals. Jews are

mice, Germans are cats. Other creatures represent other nationalities.

Maus has had its critics – some people are queasy with his use of

animals to depict ethnic and national groups, feeling that it is

uncomfortably close to the ways in which Jews were shown in Nazi

propaganda – but it has proved an inspirational work of art to others.

Spiegelman’s intention was always to undermine racial and national

sterotypes, rather than confirm them, and, for most readers, his satiric

use of the comic convention of anthropomorphising animals in Maus


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does just that. His book ultimately transcends the genre in which it was

created and becomes an immensely powerful and uplifting tale of

persecution, suffering and survival.

�Read onIn the Shadow of No Towers (Spiegelman’s response to the events of

9/11)

Will Eisner, A Contract with God; Joe Sacco, Palestine; Marjane Satrapi,

Persepolis

HENRY DAVID THOREAU (1817–62) USA

WALDEN (1854)In the 1840s, the American writer and intellectual Henry David Thoreau

spent two years living alone in an isolated cabin in the woods of

Massachusetts, growing his own food and attending to his own simple

needs. Out of this experience came Walden. Few other works embody

so well the American belief in individual freedom and the importance of

self-sufficiency and ploughing one’s own furrow in life. Thoreau’s book

is an extraordinary mixture of the visionary and the practical. He

emphasises the quasi-religious properties of a communion with nature

but he also describes his domestic economy, his agricultural experi -

ments and his observations of flora and fauna with great precision. He

questions the materialism of his age and the work ethic behind it yet he

never loses sight of the ‘real’ world of civilisation to which he returned.


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HENRY DAVID THOREAU

Combining philosophy, political thought and natural history in his

writings, Thoreau can be seen as a forerunner of today’s ecologists and

environmentalists. Most of all, he remains an eloquent advocate of the

importance of listening to one’s inner voice. Sometimes doing so might

lead one into difficulties, even into direct opposition to authority.

Thoreau himself was very briefly imprisoned when he refused to pay his

taxes because of his disapproval of slavery and of the Mexican-

American war, a refusal he justified in a famous essay entitled ‘Civil

Disobedience’. Society for Thoreau was important but it was not so

important as the freedom of the individual. In the final analysis, a man

could not surrender to the wishes of the majority his own freedom to act

as his own conscience and inner self told him he should. As Thoreau

wrote in Walden, ‘If a man does not keep pace with his companions,

perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the

music which he hears, however measured or far away.’

�Read onCivil Disobedience; A Week on the Concord and Merrimack RiversEdward Abbey, Desert Solitaire; Ralph Waldo Emerson, SelectedEssays; Benjamin Franklin, Autobiography; Aldo Leopold, A SandCounty Almanac; Norman Maclean, A River Runs Through It


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J.R.R. TOLKIEN (1892–1973) UK

THE LORD OF THE RINGS (1954–55)Born in South Africa but brought to England as a young child, Tolkien

grew up to spend the greater part of his adult life as an academic. Only

service in the First World War, in which he fought at the Somme,

interrupted the even tenor of a life passed mostly in England’s ancient

universities and in the study of language, literature and mythology. The

results of that study were not only academic works like the standard

edition of the Middle English poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knightbut also the vast, three-volume saga entitled The Lord of the Rings. Set

in the fantasy lands of Middle-earth, and peopled by an array of men,

hobbits, elves, dwarves, orcs and other races, The Lord of the Ringschronicles the struggle for possession of the One Ring and its powers

and the ongoing confrontation between the forces of good and the

forces of evil in Middle-earth. In the fifty years since the books

appeared, many other authors have followed in his path and written

epic works of fantasy but Tolkien outclasses all his imitators. He does so

not so much because of his plot (the simple and morally explicit battle

between good and evil is easy to replicate) as thanks to his teeming

imagination. Drawing on his own encyclopaedic knowledge of such

subjects as Norse mythology, Anglo-Saxon literature and medieval

philology, he gave his made-up worlds complete systems of language,

history, anthropology and geography. Reading him is like exploring an

entire library – his invention seems inexhaustible. In poll after poll in

recent years, Tolkien’s masterwork has been chosen as the greatest and

best loved novel of the twentieth century. There seems little reason to

suppose that this verdict will change in any future public votes.


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LEO TOLSTOY

�Read onThe SilmarillionRobert Jordan, The Eye of the World (the first in the epic ‘Wheel of Time’

series); Ursula Le Guin, The Earthsea Quartet

LEO TOLSTOY (1828–1910) RUSSIA

THE KINGDOM OF GOD IS WITHIN YOU (1894)Tolstoy is, of course, best-known as a novelist and War and Peace and

Anna Karenina are regarded by most critics as two of the greatest

novels ever published. These two masterpieces are works of their

writer’s middle years. As he grew older Tolstoy became increasingly

disenchanted with the books he had written and, indeed, with the

whole notion of fiction. He was drawn into a profound moral struggle in

which he began to look upon his life so far, and his earlier writings, as

empty and meaningless. This spiritual crisis and Tolstoy’s attempts to

find answers to his questions about the meaning of life are chronicled

in A Confession, written in the early 1880s. A dozen years later, Tolstoy

published The Kingdom of God is Within You, a summation of the

Christian ideas in which he came to believe. His ethical writings,

including The Kingdom of God Is Within You, revolve around a belief

in the overwhelming importance of love (towards both God and

humanity) as a moral principle. Evil, in this view, was not to be directly

resisted, private property was to be renounced and governments and

churches, which stifled the soul, were to be abolished. Over the years,

Tolstoy himself made over his fortune to his wife and increasingly took


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upon himself the dress and habits of the peasants he admired. His

religious credo in his final years had little to do with established

religions. ‘Nowhere nor in anything, except in the assertion of the

Church,’ he wrote, ‘can we find that God or Christ founded anything like

what Churchmen understand by the Church.’ Instead he found his

spiritual salvation in what he saw as the uncorrupted truths expressed

by Christ in the Gospels. Tolstoy’s willingness to acknowledge the

radical implications of Christian belief continues to challenge hypocrisy

and complacency a century after his death.


�Read onA Confession; Resurrection (Tolstoy’s last major work of fiction deals

with many of the same ideas and themes that can be found in his

ethical writings)

Peter Kropotkin, The Conquest of Bread

LAO TZU (?6th century BC) CHINA

THE TAO TE CHING (?6th century BC)In Chinese tradition, Lao Tzu is described as a contemporary of

Confucius but more recently scholars have expressed doubts about his

reality as a historical figure and have argued that the Tao Te Ching, the

text ascribed to him, is an amalgamation of writings and sayings by a


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number of individuals. Certainly some of the stories attached to Lao

Tzu’s name suggest a legendary hero rather than a historical character.

He is variously said to have been born as a old man with a grey beard,

after sixty-two years in the womb, to have lived for nine hundred and

ninety years and to have owed his conception to his mother looking at a

falling star. Whether Lao Tzu was a historical figure or a legendary one

matters less than that the writings attributed to him have long had a

central place in Chinese culture and that they continue to provide

inspiration and meaning in the lives of millions of readers around the

world today. Tao means literally ‘way’ or ‘path’ and the Tao Te Ching, at

its simplest level, is a guide to how to live one’s life virtuously and in

harmony with the universe. The path, however, is not necessarily easy to

pick out. The Tao Te Ching is an enigmatic guide. ‘The Tao that can be

told is not the eternal Tao,’ it begins, ‘The name that can be named is not

the eternal name.’ It becomes no simpler as its lines progress. Only by

study and meditation on the paradoxes and ambiguities of the Tao TeChing can its multiple meanings be understood. For those in search of

an easy road to enlightenment, this classic of Chinese literature and

philosophy is not recommended; for those prepared to work towards

right living and right thinking, its subtleties repay regular reading.

�Read onBenjamin Hoff, The Tao of Pooh; Alan Watts, Tao: The WatercourseWay


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READONATHEME: WISDOM FROM THE EAST

Confucius, AnalectsThe Gospel of Sri RamakrishnaThe I ChingThe Lotus SutraPaul Reps (ed), Zen Flesh, Zen BonesD.T. Suzuki, Essays in Zen BuddhismAlan Watts, The Way of ZenRichard Wilhelm (ed), The Secret of the Golden Flower

SUN TZU (?544 BC–?496 BC) CHINA

THE ART OF WAR (?6th century BC) The Art of War is the oldest and very probably the most influential of all

books about military strategy. Probably written six centuries before the

time of Christ, it was translated into French by a Jesuit priest in the

eighteenth century but the first English version did not appear until

1905. Since its publication in the West, its value has always been

recognised. Generals from Napoleon to Douglas MacArthur have drawn

upon the wisdom it contains. Modern business leaders, politicians,

chess players and football managers have all found the lessons it

inculcates of value. Even fictional mafiosi find it of interest. In an


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episode of the TV series The Sopranos, Tony Soprano admits to a

friend, ‘Been reading that book you told me about. You know, The Art ofWar by Sun Tzu. I mean here’s this guy, a Chinese general, wrote this

thing 2400 years ago, and most of it still applies today!‘ Crime boss

Soprano is speaking no more than the truth. Originally devised during

a period of almost non-stop warfare between rival Chinese states, the

ideas expressed in The Art of War have proved adaptable to changing

circumstances over the ensuing centuries. Sun Tzu’s theory of strategy,

with its emphasis on self-knowledge and preparedness (‘If you know

others and know yourself, you will not be imperiled in a hundred

battles’), can be almost endlessly re-interpreted and re-applied. The

author of The Art of War was a near contemporary of Confucius but, like

the great Chinese philosopher-statesman, his work still speaks to

people living in societies utterly unlike the one in which it was written.

It can offer insights on life to those who have never set foot on a

battlefield and to those who are never likely to find themselves, like

Tony Soprano, at the head of an organised crime family.

�Read onCarl von Clausewitz, On War; Niccolo Machiavelli, The Prince;

Miyamoto Musashi, The Book of Five Rings


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KURT VONNEGUT (1922–2007) USA

SLAUGHTERHOUSE-FIVE (1969)Kurt Vonnegut was born in Indiana and was studying at Cornell

University when he enlisted in the US Army. Vonnegut’s views of the

world and of humanity were profoundly shaped by his experiences

when he served in the American forces in Europe during World War Two.

Captured by the Germans, he was present in Dresden in February 1945

when the city was firebombed by the Allies and tens of thousands lost

their lives. Vonnegut survived but the bombing of the city scarred him

for the rest of his life. In some sense, all his later writing can be seen as

a response to the destruction of Dresden and as an attempt to explain

his own chance survival but Slaughterhouse-Five, in particular, takes

the facts of his life and transforms them into remarkable fiction. The

central character in the novel is Billy Pilgrim whose experiences in World

War Two echo those of Vonnegut. However, Billy is also a person who

has become ‘unstuck’ in time. His life does not unfold for him in chrono -

logical order but moves randomly back and forth along its timeline.

What is more, he is in contact with aliens from a planet named

Trafalmadore. Indeed, he is at one point kidnapped by the

Trafalmadorians who exhibit him in a zoo and expect him to mate with

a porn actress. Nonetheless it is through his contact with the

Trafalmadorians that Billy comes to terms with his life and gains some

sense of peace. The aliens see the universe in four dimensions – the

fourth being time – and thus know everything about their lives in

advance. The result is a philosophy of acceptance and fatalism and,

once Billy acknowledges the sense behind the apparent nonsense of


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the Trafalmadorian worldview, he can be happy. ‘All time is all time,’ the

Trafalmadorians tell him. ‘It does not change. It does not lend itself to

warnings or explanations. It simply is.’


�Read onCat’s Cradle; GalapagosRichard Brautigan, In Watermelon Sugar; Joseph Heller, Catch-22

ALICE WALKER (b. 1944) USA

THE COLOR PURPLE (1982)Alice Walker was born in Georgia, the child of a poor farming family, and

won college scholarships which provided opportunities to escape the

poverty and limitations of her background. In the 1960s she became an

activist in the Civil Rights movement and later worked as a journalist

and editor. She has published many collections of her poetry and her

fiction includes The Third Life of Grange Copeland, set in the rural

Georgia in which she grew up, Meridian, the story of a young black

woman active in the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s, and

Possessing the Secret of Joy, a novel which explores the consequences

of female circum cision, a practice which Walker has also outspokenly

condemned in non-fiction writings. However, her most influential novel

by far is The Color Purple, which won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction and


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was made into a big-budget Hollywood movie by Steven Spielberg in

1985. The book tells the story of Celie, a young black girl in the American

Deep South, who suffers poverty, rape and the terrors of a violent

marriage. Only when she meets the glamorous singer Shug Avery is she

able to break out of the trap her life has become and find the love and

fulfilment she has always been denied. Told through a series of diary

entries and letters and notable for its eloquent use of black American

vernacular, The Color Purple is a remarkable and inspiring book. Its title

comes from a conversation between Celie and Shug about God. Shug

says that she thinks, ‘it pisses God off if you walk by the color purple in

a field somewhere and don’t notice it.’ The novel traces Celie’s journey

from abuse and disempowerment to a position where she can celebrate

not only ‘the color purple’ but all the other joys and riches of life.

�Read onMeridian; Possessing the Secret of JoyZora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God; Toni Morrison, TheBluest Eye

EDMUND WHITE (b. 1940) USA

A BOY’S OWN STORY (1982)Edmund White was born in Cincinatti and grew up in Chicago. After

studying Chinese at the University of Michigan, he worked as a journalist

and occasional novelist in New York before A Boy’s Own Story became


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EDMUND WHITE

a critical and commercial success. In his fiction since then – in novels

like The Beautiful Room Is Empty and The Farewell Symphony – White

has charted the trajectory of a generation of gay men from the joyful

promiscuity of the pre-AIDS era to the more sombre realities of lives

overshadowed by the threat of death and disease. A Boy’s Own Story,

still his most famous book, works in a long tradition of the coming-of-age

novel but re-imagines it from a gay perspective. Growing up in the

America of the 1950s, a time of repression and suppression for gay men,

White’s nameless narrator has to struggle with his emotional isolation

from his parents and his peers. His increasing awareness of his own

homosexuality brings with it complicated feelings of desire and shame.

Privileged because of his father’s wealth and the material comforts it

provides, his upbringing is also deprived. Both his parents are aloof and

unloving and he yearns for an affection and an intimacy that are denied

him. Only in the consolations of art and literature and in a sexual

relationship with another, younger teenage boy, graphically but tenderly

described in the novel, does he achieve some sense of what he is and

what he might become. In an essay published in the early 1990s, White

wrote that, ‘As a young teenager I looked desperately for things to read

that might excuse me or assure me I wasn’t the only one, that might

confirm an identity I was unhappily piecing together.’ A Boy’s Own Storyhas the power to do just that.

�Read onThe Beautiful Room Is Empty; The Farewell SymphonyAlan Hollinghurst, The Swimming Pool Library; David Leavitt, The LostLanguage of Cranes; Colm Tóibín, The Story of the Night


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ELIE WIESEL (b. 1928) ROMANIA/USA

NIGHT (1960)Elie Wiesel’s life and work has been shaped by his experience of the

Holocaust and by his own extraordinary determination to bear

witness to the suffering he saw and to the attempted destruction of

European Jewry by the Nazis. He was born into a Hasidic family in the

Romanian town of Sighet and was a teenager when almost the entire

Jewish population of the town was deported to Auschwitz. Wiesel

survived his experiences in the concentration camp and on one of

the so-called ‘death marches’ across Germany in the last months of

the war but his parents and other members of his family did not. After

the war he lived first in France where he studied at the Sorbonne and

later worked as a journalist and then in the USA where he began to

publish the fiction and non-fiction for which he is famous and to

lecture on the Holocaust. For more than fifty years, Wiesel has been

indefatigable in his efforts to ensure that the terrible experiences of

millions of Jews at the hands of the Nazis should not be forgotten. He

has been quoted as saying that, ‘I decided to devote my life to telling

the story because I felt that having survived I owe something to the

dead … and anyone who does not remember betrays them again.’

Night, with its spare and undemonstrative narrative of the horrors

that Wiesel saw as a scholarly and unworldly teenager brusquely

thrust into the nightmare of Auschwitz, is a profoundly moving

example of personal suffering transmuted into a work of art that

speaks very directly to its readers. Most will agree with the statement

made by the Nobel committee in 1986, when awarding him the Nobel


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READ ON A THEME: SURVIVING THE HOLOCAUST

Peace Prize, that Wiesel is, ‘a messenger to mankind; his message is

one of peace, atonement and human dignity.’

�Read onDawn; Day; The ForgottenImre Kertesz, Fateless; Daniel Mendelsohn, The Lost: A Search for Sixof Six Million

READONATHEME: SURVIVING THE HOLOCAUST (fiction and non-fiction)

Jean Améry, At the Mind’s LimitsAharon Appelfeld, The Story of a LifeTadeusz Borowski, This Way for the Gas, Ladies and GentlemenCharlotte Delbo, Auschwitz and AfterFania Fénelon, The Musicians of AuschwitzGerda Weissman Klein, All But My LifeOlga Lengyel, Five ChimneysYehuda Nir, The Lost ChildhoodAndré Schwarz-Bart, The Last of the Just


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JEANETTE WINTERSON (b. 1959) UK

ORANGES ARE NOT THE ONLY FRUIT (1985)Born in Manchester, Jeanette Winterson was adopted by an evangelical

couple and brought up in the belief that she was intended by God to

become a Christian missionary. In her teens she rebelled against this

destiny, openly acknowledged her lesbianism and left home. After

studying English at Oxford, she published Oranges Are Not the OnlyFruit in 1985. In the years since then she has written a number of other

novels ranging from works that mix elements of historical fiction and

the magic realist novel (The Passion and Sexing the Cherry) to books

like The Powerbook which play with ideas of time and cyberspace. She

has also written fiction recently (Tanglewreck and The Stone Gods, for

instance) aimed primarily at children. Oranges Are Not the Only Fruitclearly draws upon Winterson’s own life. The central character, Jeanette,

is adopted and, like her creator, grows up believing that she has a

special destiny as a preacher and a missionary. She accepts this until,

in her teens, she falls for another young woman and chooses love and

sexuality over the demands of religion and family. However, there is

much more going on in the book than simply a fictional remoulding of

autobiographical experience. The novel is a rich celebration of diversity

and difference. Very early on in the book Jeanette says of her mother,

‘She had never heard of mixed feelings. There were friends and there

were enemies.’ The whole of the narrative stands as a rebuke to the

black and white morality of Jeanette’s mother. In the world that Jeanette

chooses, it is mixed feelings rather than narrow certainties that are to

be applauded. Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit is a novel that turns its


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back on small-mindedness and instead rejoices in the liberating power

of love, sex, language and ideas.

�Read onThe Passion; The PowerbookDorothy Allison, Bastard Out of Carolina; Sarah Waters, Tipping theVelvet

NAOMI WOLF (b. 1962) USA

THE BEAUTY MYTH (1991)One of the so-called ‘third wave’ of feminist writers, Naomi Wolf shot to

fame with her first book, The Beauty Myth, in which she argued that

women were in thrall to false notions of beauty that merely served to

keep men in the driving seat. ‘“Beauty”, she wrote, ‘is a currency system

like the gold standard. Like any economy, it is determined by politics,

and in the modern age in the West it is the last, best belief system that

keeps male dominance intact.’ Wolf’s book is subtitled ‘How Images of

Beauty Are Used Against Women’ and her argument is that the pressure

on women to conform to a restrictive ideal of beauty serves to keep

them under control. In ‘the beauty myth’ patriarchy has discovered a

new means of keeping women in a subordinate position. Women, made

insecure by the images presented in the media and in advertising,

collaborate in the maintenance of this subordination but Wolf provides

the ammunition in her book to destroy the beauty myth. In the years


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since the publication of The Beauty Myth, Wolf has continued to be a

radical voice. Her most recent book, The End of America, raises her

deep concerns that civil liberties are at risk in contemporary America

and that the Bush administration has introduced and endorsed policies

which have parallels in the rise to power of totalitarian regimes.

However, none of her work has had quite the impact that her first book

had. At a time when the number of anorexic and bulimic women is

increasing, when cosmetic surgeons are finding that more and more

women, dissatisfied with their own bodies, are willing to pay to go

under the knife, when the diet industry makes billions worldwide, the

message Wolf wished to convey in 1991 seems just as apposite in 2008.

�Read onFire with Fire; PromiscuitiesSusan Faludi, Backlash; Susie Orbach, Fat Is a Feminist Issue

VIRGINIA WOOLF (1882–1940) UK

A ROOM OF ONE’S OWN (1929)The daughter of an eminent critic and scholar, Virginia Stephen was

born into the heart of the intellectual establishment of Victorian

England but, as a woman, was not given the opportunity to extend her

education by attending university. Nonetheless, both before and after

her marriage to the writer and political theorist Leonard Woolf, she was

a leading member of the Bloomsbury Group, an informal association of


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VIRGINIA WOOLF

writers, artists and intellectuals which played a major role in British

cultural life in the first few decades of the twentieth century. She is

acknowledged as one of the most rewarding and innovative novelists of

her time. In works like Mrs. Dalloway, To the Lighthouse and TheWaves she revealed her fascination with individual psychology, using

often avant-garde techniques of narration to reveal the internal lives of

her characters. She was also a distinguished critic and author of non-

fiction books that ranged from biographies to collections of literary

essays. Despite all her achievements, she remained acutely aware of

the limitations imposed on her by her sex. Based on a series of lectures

Woolf gave at Cambridge University, A Room of One’s Own is a witty,

ironic but passionate plea for the liberty and personal space that artists,

especially women, need to make the most of their imagination and

creativity. Woolf draws on her skills as a novelist (she invents, for

example, a sister for Shakespeare, one just as awesomely gifted as her

brother, who finds that society offers her no opportunity to express her

gifts) in order to express as vividly as possible her argument about the

thwarting of talent and genius. Society has changed greatly over eighty

years but its central thesis – that creativity demands freedom of many

kinds – remains as true today as when A Room of One’s Own was first

published.

�Read onThe Common Reader; Three GuineasCharlotte Perkins Gilman, The Yellow Wallpaper; Elaine Showalter, TheFemale Malady


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PARAMAHANSA YOGANANDA (1893–1952)

INDIA

THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF A YOGI (1946)Born in Uttar Pradesh, Paramahansa Yogananda became one of the first

Indian spiritual teachers to live for long periods in the West and he

introduced many westerners to eastern ideas about religion and

meditation. His own teachings drew on a wide range of ancient

traditions but his specific method was that of Kriya Yoga, a supposedly

lost practice of yogic techniques revived by the mysterious Indian holy

man Mahavatar Babaji. In The Autobiography of a Yogi Yogananda

states that he received the teachings from his guru Swami Sri Yuktesar

who had received them from his guru who had, in turn, been a disciple

of Mahavatar Babaji. Whatever the origins of Kriya Yoga, it is at the heart

of Yogananda’s teachings, although its principles may not be the first

things that readers remember about his book. At the simplest level, TheAutobiography of a Yogi is just a great read. Its pages are filled with

astonishing people (the Tiger Swami, who had wrestled and defeated

tigers, the Levitating Saint, saints who have lived without food for

decades), with miraculous healings and with events that defy the ideas

of modern science. Yogananda’s story, whether you believe everything

that it contains or not, is very entertaining and written in an old-

fashioned English that has charms of its own. Beneath the enjoyable

telling of his tale, however, his message is clear. Man is a spiritual not a

material being and it is the aim and the duty of each person to realise

this truth. Yogananda’s teaching can help in this process. ‘The goal of

yoga science,’ he writes, ‘is to calm the mind, that without distortion it


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GARY ZUKAV

may hear the infallible counsel of the Inner Voice.’ Still the mind and the

truth about our spiritual selves will be heard. It is a comforting and

inspiring message.

�Read onMan’s Eternal QuestSri Nisargadatta Maharaj, I Am That; Swami Sri Yukteswar, The HolyScience

GARY ZUKAV (b. 1942) USA

THE SEAT OF THE SOUL (1989)Gary Zukav, Harvard graduate and Vietnam veteran, first came to the

public’s attention in the late 1970s as the writer of The Dancing Wu LiMasters, one of the best and most accessible of a number of popular

science books published at the time which explored the similarities

between quantum physics and Eastern philosophy. With The Seat ofthe Soul, published some ten years later, he switched his attention

from science to the spiritual realm. In the book, Zukav questions the

traditional, Western model of the soul with which most of us are familiar

and proposes a new way of looking at spirituality. Everyone has a soul

but, in Zukav’s view, not everyone is aware of it. Some people remain

mired in the realm of the senses and only when they can transcend the

five senses and align their personalities with their multisensory souls

will they reach their true potential. This new alignment is important not


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only for the individual but for the development of mankind in general.

The changes which Zukav highlights are, he believes, all part and parcel

of a new phase of human evolution. ‘We are evolving,’ he writes, ‘from

a species that pursues external power into a species that pursues

authentic power. We are leaving behind exploration of the physical

world as our sole means of evolution. This means of evolution, and the

consciousness that results from an awareness that is limited to the five-

sensory modality, are no longer adequate to what we must become.’

Like Zukav’s earlier book, The Seat of the Soul, with its attempt to join

together elements of new age thinking, traditional religious belief and

modern psychology, is an ambitious work. It may not always be

successful but, for many of its readers, it provides a profound and

inspiring journey into the world of the spirit.

�Read onSoul to SoulDeepak Chopra, The Seven Spiritual Laws of Success; Wayne Dyer,

Change Your Thoughts, Change Your Life


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